To beat the heat, thieves decamp with ice cream - and deep-freezer- from Mumbai supermart!
Darpan News Desk IANS, 02 Jun, 2023 01:03 PM
Mumbai, June 2 (IANS) AIn a bizarre crime, two thieves allegedly stole a freezer and scores of kilos of ice-cream at the dead of the hot summer night from a closed supermart in Borivali suburb, a police official said on Friday.
The incident, which happened around 2 a.m. on May 28, came to light after a complaint by Jayesh R. Patel, owner of Daily Needs Grocery & Bakery in IC Colony supermart , north-west Mumbai and scanning the CCTV cameras there, said Senior Police Inspector Sudhir Kudalkar of MHB Police Station.
Immediately, Kudalkar set up a crack team comprising Akhilesh Bombe, Sandeep Gorde, Praveen Jopale, Arjun Aher, Ganesh Shermale, Sandeep Parit to solve the strange theft within barely three hours.
The CCTV footage showed two shop helpers - Omaram D. Rabaria, 24 and Votaram B. Meghwal, both residents of Nalasopara town in Palghar - helping a tempo worker to load the heavy freezer on the vehicle to deliver it to their home.
Though the supermart, in a densely populated residential neighbourhood, was closed at that dark hour, the furtive trio managed to quietly break it open.
They can be seen entering into the cold storage area from where they selected the old heavy duty Blue Star deep-freezer stacked with a large quantity of ice-creams intended for the supermart customers.
From the CCTV footage, the probe team tracked down the tempo to Vasai town and apprehended the driver who spilled the beans on the cool operation, and the police caught the accused duo based on their phone numbers shared with the transporter.
"We have recovered the deep-freezer worth around Rs 1.25 lakh and some packets of ice-creams of 33 varieties worth around Rs 20,000," said Kudalkar.
Meanwhile, videos of the "cold-blooded" theft at the height of a sweltering summer have gone viral on social media networks with many commenting at the cool-cat heist involving the deep-freezer instead of some other valuable stuff stocked in the supermart.
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Lakhimpur Kheri Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Santosh Gupta, said that one staff member was also found Covid-positive during a contact tracing exercise on Sunday after which the entire campus has been turned into a quarantine centre by the Health department. This is the highest number of new Covid cases reported in a district in a day this year.
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