Thieves tend to hate Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras, but this one just couldn’t get enough of them. A 26-year-old graduate allegedly plucked out CCTV cameras from residential societies and markets in east Delhi and was making a tidy enough living by selling them, until a police team arrested him on Tuesday.
When a local police team raided Deepak Bansal’s house in Shahdara on Tuesday, they found 28 CCTV cameras ready to be sold in the city’s “chor bazaars” (black markets).
“He was selling each camera for as little as Rs 300-400. He believed it was an easy and sustainable business,” a police officer said on Thursday on condition of anonymity.
On an average, a CCTV camera costs around Rs 1,200.
Police said Bansal’s working method was simple. He would cover his face with a handkerchief and head out to unguarded neighbourhoods and markets that relied more on CCTV cameras and less on security guards.
“He would pluck out multiple cameras in one outing. It hardly required any effort,” said the officer cited above.
Bansal never bothered about the digital video recorders (DVRs), which were anyway beyond his reach.
“He was getting captured by cameras day after day, and we would see his footage from the DVRs left behind, but he was careful to never take off the handkerchief,” the officer maintained.
But there was one thing in the footage that the investigators noticed and remembered. He wore a grey jacket during all the five thefts he committed.
That also helped the police confirm that all the five thefts of CCTV cameras in different neighbourhoods had been committed by the same person.
“We constituted a special team of officers from the Mansarovar Park police station and spread them out in neighbourhoods where the suspect was likely to strike again. As it turned out, the suspect returned to steal again in the early hours of Tuesday,” said Meghna Yadav, deputy commissioner of police (Shahdara).
It was Bansal’s presence on the street around 2.30am that aroused the police’s suspicion. They checked his jacket and it was the same one worn by the thief caught by the DVRs. Bansal was questioned, but he denied his involvement in the thefts.
“So, we came up with the idea of masking him with a handkerchief that was similar to the one worn by the suspect in the footage. There was a striking similarity. We searched Bansal’s home to find 28 cameras hidden there. He confessed after that,” said an investigator.
The investigator quoted Bansal as confessing that he had stolen CCTV cameras for many weeks, adding that he may have committed more than the five thefts in which he was caught on camera.
Bansal has been arrested and booked for theft.
First Published: Jan 18, 2019 08:58 IST