A 22-year-old man, who used to work as a house help in Delhi, was arrested on Thursday on charges of allegedly making off with jewellery and cash, both valued at Rs 3 crore from the house he was employed at, the police said. According to police, he had allegedly been planning to use the proceeds to flee to Nepal and open a restaurant-cafe there.

Moreover, the father-in-law of the accused and a juvenile aged 17 were also arrested in connection with the burglary, the police added. If police are to be believed, they have recovered 117 gold and diamond jewellery items worth Rs 3 crore, besides seizing Rs 4.34 lakh in cash and the bags allegedly used to transport the stolen valuables.

The key accused has been identified as Anil Kamat, who is a native of Bihar. His father-in-law who aided him in the crime is named Dev Chandra Sah (49), while the juvenile held is a resident of Giridih in Jharkhand. While the former worked as a vegetable vendor, the latter too worked as a domestic servant.

Incident reported from Timarpur

According to police reports, they received information about the burglary on September 6 from a house located on Mall Road in the Timarpur area of North Delhi. The complainant, named Anshul Gupta, told the police that his elder brother, Anuj Gupta, and his family had travelled abroad on September 2. The family later came to know that the house had been burgled. As per police, two domestic workers employed by the family the previous month had gone missing after the incident, while their cell phones were also switched off.

The Timarpur police registered a case and began probing the incident.

CCTV trail spans three states

As the cops began tracking the suspects, they sifted through footage from more than 300 CCTV cameras across Delhi, Jharkhand and Bihar. Police said the suspects were traced from Mall Road to the Inter-State Bus Terminal (ISBT), New Delhi Railway Station and subsequently towards Mukarba Chowk. WIth the help of technical surveillance and cyber intelligence, the police established the links of the suspects to Bihar and Jharkhand.

A police team was dispatched to Darbhanga, where CCTV footage showed Kamat and the juvenile at a railway station on September 8. The juvenile was later traced to his kin’s house in Giridih and was detained on September 10.

Meanwhile, Kamat was traced to an area near Simrahi in Bihar’s Supaul district, where his in-laws used to reside. When police raided the premises, they did not find him there, but Sah was present and was interrogated.

Jewellery buried five feet beneath the ground

Police said a red bag matching the one spotted in the CCTV footage was found concealed under a bed. Another bag containing cash was recovered from sacks of hay.

During interrogation, Sah told the police that the stolen jewellery had been buried beneath the floor of another room. Officials said the jewellery bag was recovered from a depth of about five feet after around an hour of digging.

Sah was later arrested for allegedly possessing stolen property and was sent to judicial custody. Kamat was detained by local police in the Pratapganj area and was then arrested on Wednesday.

Police alleged that Kamat and his aides had planned to travel to Nepal, open a restaurant or a cafe and use the burglary proceeds to fund a lavish lifestyle. The investigating police personnel said Kamat had previously been involved in a burglary case involving around Rs 1.25 crore in Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh area.