Alert farmer foils midnight bank heist

BENGALURU: An alert youngster averted a bank heist at Amadalli village, about 12km from Karwar, in the early hours of Monday. Three robbers fell into an open well while trying to escape from the villagers and were arrested. Police said a five-member gang arrived in the village in a car and entered the Karnataka Grameen Vikas Bank branch around 11.30pm on Sunday . It is said the bank had gold jewellery worth Rs 2 crore besides cash in the lockers. The gang members -all in the age group of 35-40 years -apparently had complete knowledge of the bank and entered it by breaking open a window.With their faces covered, they smashed the CCTV camera, destroyed the computers and cut the power supply to the emergency alarm. They allegedly began to cut open the vault and lockers with help of the electric cutters and hammers.Around 1am, when they were trying to open the lockers with hammers, Santosh, a farmer who lives nearby, heard the sound and alerted his friends about it.Santosh said, “I suspected that someone was trying to rob the bank and alerted my friends. Initially, six of us went there, and found people inside. We alerted the villagers and police.“Realizing that villagers and police had surrounded the bank, the robbers tried to escape by jumping out of the window and started running, the locals said.As villagers and police chased them, three of the gang members -Kuppa Sachin, Manikanthan and Shekhar -slipped and fell in a 30-foot open well. Meanwhile, the other two -Kumar and Chinthan -escaped in their car.The trio sustained head injuries as the well had very little water. Immediately, fire and emergency service personnel were summoned to bring the trio up. They were arrested and sent to the district hospital for treatment.Though the robbers had identity cards of Jharkhand, police said they were fake and that all of them hailed from Tamil Nadu.“They may have committed similar robberies in other parts of the state,“ police said, adding that they are on the lookout for the other two.