The Ghaziabad police on Thursday claimed to have busted a gang of highway robbers with the arrest of one of them and recovered 380 cartons of cigarettes worth Rs 3.5 crore.
Ghaziabad SSP K.S. Emmanuel, in a press conference, said that on May 23, a GPS-enabled truck carrying cigarette cartons from the ITC Limited factory at Saharanpur was looted by six armed robbers at Bhojpur village of Ghaziabad.
The robbers had followed the truck in their Safari car from Saharanpur, overtaken it and forced the driver to halt in Bhojpur village.
After injecting the driver with some drug rendering him unconscious, the robbers dumped him in the back of the truck and drove to Mathura where they unloaded the consignment into three small trucks and dispatched one of them to Mumbai, said Emmanuel.
The robbers stacked the remaining consignment in Bhojpur from where they commenced retailing the cigarettes to different cities in Uttar Pradesh.
Through surveillance, the police succeeded in nabbing the retailer who used to pick up the cigarettes from Bhojpur to sell them to small shop keepers in Agra, Mathura and other towns of the state.
During sustained interrogation, the retailer confessed to the crime and revealed his identity as Anil Karira, a resident of Mathura. He also revealed that there were six other criminals involved in the crime.
Police said the six criminals were being traced.
--IANS
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