DNA

• Four school dropouts make away with Rs11.70 lakh worth goods in Kandivli

Mumbai, Nov 7: They set out looking for scrap metal to sell; they stumbled across a fortune in cash and gold jewellery and they ultimately landed in police custody.

Four teenage boys, living in a slum in Kandivli reportedly tried their hand at burglary and hit paydirt when an empty house they entered yielded items worth over Rs 11.70 lac.

The boys, whose names cannot be given as they are minors, were all school dropouts and used to collect scrap metal which they then sold. On October 27, they were walking around the posh Emerald housing society in Saraf Nagar when they chanced upon an unguarded bungalow. It turned out that the guard, Shatrughan Jha had gone for a walk and the owner of the bungalow, Chetan Desai, was in Ganpatipule with his family for a vacation.

The gang of four plotted how to enter the house and pried open a window grill,  through which the tiniest of the four managed to squeeze in. He then opened the main door for his friends, police said.

Their ingenuity did not stop there. After they initially failed to open a locked cupboard, the boys toppled it and began jumping on it. It eventually yielded and the boys allegedly opened the locker inside it using a screwdriver they found in one of the drawers.

“The boys had first planned to take whatever they got and escape from the place as soon as possible,” according to Shivaji Bodke, DCP, Zone XII. But when they found cash, jewellery, silver utensils etc, they quickly put all of it in a plastic bag and ran from the spot, leaving behind a few items in their hurry.  When Desai returned home and found his house burgled he informed the police, who initially felt it was a professional job.

The boys had meanwhile begun using the cash to buy appliances, which roused the suspicions of some people who tipped off the police. The four were arrested and they soon confessed to their crime, the police claimed.

Two of them are orphans while the other two are children of daily wage earners. They have been sent to the juvenile court. The police are now questioning the parents of these two to find out how much they knew about the crime.