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Tamil Nadu
Diverting attention of persons and snatching valuables is not uncommon, writes S. Vijay Kumar A senior citizen walked out of a nationalised bank in West Mambalam last week with his pension. As he was about to start his scooter, two motorcycle borne youths snatched his cash bag and sped away. Even as the victim, a retired bank official, raised an alarm , they vanished . Diverting the attention of unsuspecting persons and snatching their valuables is the modus operandi that has been prevalent for long. Another dimension to the crime pattern is how two-member gangs a pproach elderly or naïve-looking women in isolated residential areas and cheat them. The suspects would “advice” the targeted person not to wear jewellery as the area was prone to robberies. While assisting them to keep the jewels safe in a bag or piece of cloth, the accused would replace the valuables with duplicates or simply snatch them away. “Crime committed by diverting the attention of people is a trick adopted by select group of criminals who operate near banks, ATMs and post offices. Gangs based at Rajamangalam near Chennai and Nagari Puthur (Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh) are notorious for these types of offences. We have taken measures to curb such incidents by deploying plainclothesmen at banks during peak transaction period such as first week of every month,” Commissioner of Police K. Radhakrishnan said. The modus operandi that had come to notice on many occasions in the recent past was diverting the attention of people by dropping currency notes. “The suspects usually operate in groups. They will fix a target coming out of a bank with money and drop a currency note near him or her. While one of the suspects would tell the victim that he or she had dropped the money, the other would snatch the cash bag or jewels and escape.” Mr. Radhakrishnan said that people should not entertain any advice from strangers, particularly when they are carrying valuables. “There are cases when people lost lakhs of rupees when they tried to pick a Rs. 100 note that was not theirs…sometimes greed facilitates such crimes,” he said. When two suspects, Manikandan and Sasikumar of Chennai, were arrested by a special team in July last year, they confessed to having committed a series of crimes where lonely or elderly women were the victims. “Police recovered about 140 sovereigns of jewellery from them,” Mr. Radhakrishnan said. Besides heightened vigil in vulnerable areas by security agencies, awareness among the people about offences involving diversion of attention will help, he added.
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