Muthoottu heist: 9 arrested and 34 Kg gold recovered

Bangalore: It took over two months for a nine-member gang to execute a well-planned heist. On June 2, they looted gold jewellery and cash worth over Rs 5 crore from the office of Mini Muthoottu Nidhi finance firm in JB Nagar.
Eight days later, they were cooling their heels behind bars, and police recovered 34.638 kg gold jewellery.
The arrested are Nirmal Rajkumar, Jaikumar, Bhaskaran, Das Prakash, Manivannan, Suresh, Setu, Manoj and Laurel.Police have seized a two-wheeler and four-wheeler, which the gang had used to execute the heist.
At 5.45 pm on June 2, Muthoottu manager Issac V John was returning home on his scooter from office when he was knocked down by a motorcycle on Indiranagar 12th Cross. Immediately, four persons offered to take John to hospital, but gave him chloroform in the car and dumped him unconscious near Malur in Kolar.
The next day, office staff discovered that the gang had taken the office key from John's scooter, opened the strongroom and decamped with gold jewellery and Rs 1.8 lakh cash.
Police commissioner Shankar Bidari on Thursday said the mastermind behind the heist was Nirmal Rajkumar, a building contractor and network programmer. Rajkumar had undergone huge business losses; he was, in fact, a former borrower of Muthoottu finance. While trying to recover his losses, Rajkumar thought of robbing the finance firm. He knew Jaikumar, a plumber from Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. Jaikumar was arrested in 2006 by Mahadevapura police in connection with a kidnap case and was out on bail. When Rajkumar explained his plan to Jaikumar, the latter called his friends -- Bhaskaran, Das Prakash, Manivannan, Suresh and Setu -- all from Tiruvannamalai. Rajkumar also roped in his friends Manoj and Laurel into the `venture'.