The police who had no previous records of the accused got an unexpected breakthrough in the case when a man they detained for sleeping in the railway station premises confessed to the theft.

On September 4, Ajay Laxminarayan Mukherjee’s house in Matunga’s Railway Colony was broken into between 10 am and 2.30 pm when he and his wife were away at work. The robbers had stolen gold ornaments weighing 160 gm and Rs 40,000 in cash and neither Mukherjee nor the police had any clue about who the robbers could be.

“Despite reviewing our previous records we were not able to trace the robbers till one day when we suddenly picked up a man, identified as Sanjay Babulal Kumar, for sleeping at Mahim station and brought him to the police station. After grilling him for some time he confessed that he had committed a theft and even showed us Mukherjee’s house,” said Assistant Police Inspector Sadanand Lohar from the Shahunagar police station.

Kumar, who hails from Bihar, eventually led the police to his accomplices —Salman Shah, Vikas Shah, Shivkumar Yadav and Shivshankar Jat. “All these youths do not have a permanent address in Mumbai and sleep in parked tempos, railway stations and outside shops at night. They claim that they came to the city a few months ago, but we don’t know how they got acquainted with each other,” said Lohar.

“They have knowledge about the quality of gold and can differentiate authentic jewellery from fake. While interrogating them in this theft case, they revealed that they stole only those gold ornaments which bore the mark of originality and left the imitation ornaments behind,” said Lohar. The police were successful in recovering gold ornaments worth Rs 90,000.