The Additional Sessions Court-2 Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday found notorious criminal Devinder Singh aka Bunty Chor (44), guilty in a case pertaining to a burglary at the house of an NRI in the Kerala capital four years ago. The court will pronounce the quantum of punishment on April 22.
The Judge said that Bunty Chor, who had been in prison for the last four years, was found guilty of the charges of house-breaking, burglary and destruction of evidence in the case of theft at Thiruvananthapuram that took place on January 21, 2013. The Kerala Police had arrested him from a hotel in Pune three days after the burglary.
The court accepted the Prosecution’s argument that the accused had stolen a luxury car, mobile phone, electronic appliances and other things. The Prosecution prayed to the court to award maximum punishment possible for the charges slapped on him as he was a habitual offender.
Though Devinder, a Class IX dropout from Delhi, had tried to get bail several times in the past four years, all efforts had gone in vain. He was once admitted to an asylum in Thiruvananthapuram after he started showing symptoms of mental disorder. However, he was sent back to the prison after it was proved that he had no psychological disorder.
Bunty Chor was trapped mainly because of the choice of his target for theft: A hi-tech-secured house with remote-sensing fencing, remote-operated gates, bullet-proof glass-doors and windowpanes and many surveillance cameras. The trial itself was of rare nature as the Prosecution screened the CCTV images from the house in the court to prove Bunty’s crime.
The bounty Bunty Chor had taken away from Vishnu Bhavan, house of Venugopalan Nair, an NRI businessman and relative of then city Mayor K Chandrika, at Pattom in the capital, fit his much-talked-about style of trade.
Prominent among the lost items was a GPS-enabled Mitsubishi Outlander car costing over Rs27 lakh. The other items stolen from the house were a laptop costing over Rs40,000, a mobile phone worth Rs11,500, a half-a-sovereign gold ring, Rs2,000 in cash and a surveillance camera system.
Sources said Bunty Chor had reached Nair’s home in a luxury car which he had stolen earlier from the Museum police station area in the city. Bunty Chor had cut through the bullet-proof door-glass and deactivated two security alarms and CCTV cameras. However, his images were captured by one of the security cameras hidden behind a door.