M A I N   N E W S

UCO Bank looted
Tribune News service

Jalandhar, April 12
In a sensational broad daylight bank robbery, two unidentified robbers managed to slip off with a whopping Rs 16.53 lakh from the extension counter of UCO Bank at Model House locality here this afternoon. As the crime graph of the city had been going up for the past fortnight, the robbery put a question mark on the efficiency of the police and security arrangements of banks in the city.

At about 2 p.m., the masked robbers marched into the bank and overpowered the cashier, Mr Mohan Singh, who was officiating as manager since the bank in charge Mr Tilak Raj, was on leave, at pistol-point. One of them locked the gate of the bank and instructed the bank staff to move to the bathroom.

Though, interestingly, the robbers stayed in the bank for about 20 minutes, the police could not get wind of it. It reached the spot only after robbers comfortably did their job and fled the scene. The lone security guard, Bhajan Singh, was on leave today, which made the incident more mysterious.

Though nobody was arrested by the police till late in the evening, it swung into action and recovered a Maruti car abandoned by a group of four youngsters under mysterious conditions in Mohalla Karar Khan one and a half hours after the incident. The residents, who told the police about the abandoned car, said the car barged into a narrow street and this led to some damage to the car forcing baffled occupants leaving it in a huff.

The SSP, Mr Paramjit Singh Gill, revealed that staff members had been questioned and a red alert had been sounded in the city by putting up nakas at all entry and exit points of the city. Mr Gill said various police parties had been despatched to different places and efforts were on to identify the four occupants of the car, who could be involved in the incident. The police was trying to identify the owner of the car.