According to the Nashik Road police, a team of policemen on patrol duty found that computer sets were being loaded into a Maruti van in front of the BITS Computer Institute just opposite the Nashik Road police station on Sunday morning.

On seeing the police, two persons escaped in the van. The police managed to nab the third person, Dinesh Purushottam Supat on the spot. He confessed that the gang had stolen computer sets, printers, scanners, CDs and floppies from the institute.

When the van in which the thieves had escaped approached Dwarka junction on the Mumbai-Agra highway, the driver lost control and rammed intothe traffic island.

Policemen waiting at the Dwarka junction nabbed the injured persons immediately. One of them, Shriram Vidyadhar Kulkarni, who had masterminded the theft, suffered a head injury and was admitted to the civil hospital. Kulkarni is from Aurangabad and has allegedly committed similar thefts of computers in the past, police said. Jeetubhai Rathod, his accomplice, was also arrested.

The police recovered computer hardware worth Rs 2 lakhs from the accused. A diary retrieved from Kulkarni mentioned names of 51 computer training institutes in Mumbai, Nashik, Aurangabad, Pune and Satara.

The modus operandi of the gang was to approach a computer training institute as students and get acquainted with the premises before committing burglary.