The age-old adage — crime never pays and the long arm of the law eventually catches up with you — came true on Wednesday again. Even though, it took 14 long years for the law enforcement agencies to crack the theft of 90 kg of gold from the Customs vaults at Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA), the culprit did have to pay for his misdeeds in the end and was arrested on Wednesday.
The mystery of the disappearing gold began in September 2002 when gold seized by the Customs department and kept in the maalkhana began to vanish and was replaced with fake gold bars and coins.
The Customs department realised this trickery while producing the seized gold in front of the Customs court as evidence. A total of 90 kg of gold was reportedly found stolen between September 2002 and January 2003 and five First Information Reports regarding the thefts were registered by the Delhi Police.
After the Delhi Police failed to crack the mystery of the missing gold, the FIRs were transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on the order of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.
The CBI sleuths unraveled the mystery after they found fingerprints of Sanjeev Kumar, custodian of the maalkhana, then posted at IGIA.
Kumar, currently posted as Customs Superintendent at Sonipat, was finally arrested after managing to hoodwink the law enforcement agencies for over 14 years.
It turns out that Kumar took advantage of his position as the custodian of the maalkhana. He kept on pilfering the gold and replacing it with fake gold and nobody knew what was happening till it was too late and 90 kg of gold was stolen.
A team, under the supervision of CBI Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Bharat Singh, examined the packets of seized gold and they managed to trace identical fingerprints on many of the gold bars and the fake gold too.
The fingerprints were found on the bars seized between 2002 and 2003, and all the custodians of the vaults who had worked at IGIA during that period were called for questioning.
Finally, the investigating agency zeroed in on Sanjeev Kumar, Superintendent of Customs at Sonipat in Haryana. The CBI team took the finger prints of Kumar and the same matched with the ones they found on the fake gold.
Kumar was called for questioning and arrested on the basis of the evidence. He later confessed to having pilfered the gold from the maalkhana and was arrested.
CBI counsel Shampa Tikait demanded seven days police custody before the designated CBI court as there is a big nexus behind the crime that is yet to unearthed by the CBI and the replaced gold needs to be recovered. The probe agency will have to ascertain the identity of other accused persons.
The court of Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Sumit Dass, accepted the plea of the prosecution and fixed the next date of hearing as May 28. Further investigations are underway to identify other players in this organized plunder of the nations’s property, said an official.