A five-member gang of gun-toting desperadoes shot dead one person and injured another seriously, before decamping with Rs 7.90 lakh from a nationalised bank on the Ratnagiri-Ganpatipule road in coastal Konkan region on Thursday afternoon.
The five armed gangsters, all aged between 20 and 22 years, entered a branch of the Central Bank of India at Jhakadevi village, located in the neighbourhood of the famous temple town of Ganpatipule in Ratnagiri district around 1.30 pm.
Police said the miscreants gunned down Santosh Shanti Chavan ( 35), a peon working at the bank, and injured another person Suresh Suresh Sitaram Gurav (52), also a bank employee, after the latter tried to raise an alarm. The shoot-out created scare among the employees and customers, numbering around a dozen, present at the bank at that time.
Gurav, who sustained bullet wounds in his stomach, was initially admitted to a local hospital, from where he was moved to the district civil hospital at Kolhapur. Gurav’s condition was reported to be serious. After threatening the bank’s lady manager at gun point, the gangsters obtained the key of the locker. Before decamping with all the cash -— amounting to Rs 7.90 lakh — available inside the safe, the miscreants smashed the mobile phone of the lady manager.
Given that the gangsters were speaking in Hindi, the police suspect them to be outsiders. The bank employees told the police that the gangsters, all of whom were dressed in white, made good their escape in a high-end car, in which they had arrived at the bank. Following the bank robbery, the Ratnagiri district police have launched a manhunt for the desperadoes behind the crime.