IANS

Mumbai, Dec 13: The alertness of a guard at an ATM of a private bank in Mumbai foiled what otherwise would have been a well-executed heist of Rs 1.7m (Rs 17 lac), police said on Tuesday. Two men including an employee of UTI Bank’s maintenance department were arrested for attempting to rob the bank’s ATM at Bhandup in western Mumbai.

“At 11:00 pm on Saturday, Manohar Sadanand Bharti, posing as an employee of the bank, entered the ATM and asked the guard to pull down the shutter from outside, while he repaired the machine,” senior police inspector Prakash Jadhav said.

“The guard, Jayaprakash Shivprasad Yadav, told us that after 15 minutes when he peeped through the closed shutter, Bharti had dismantled the ATM and was taking money out of it.

Bharti was taken into custody and during interrogation he revealed that his friend Nilesh Pednekar, an employee of the bank’s maintenance department, had masterminded the robbery plan.

“Pednekar had given Bharti a sketch of the ATM explaining how to remove one specific part so that cash could be taken out. But Bharti panicked as he could not take out the print of the statement from the machine, which was needed so that the bank would not find out about the robbery,” the police official said.