50L theft at Andheri flat: Former dog sitter held with gang he hired

Mumbai: A dog sitter has been arrested for allegedly hiring a seasoned burglar to steal ornaments and electronic goods worth Rs 50.2 lakh from his former employer's home in Andheri while the family was away in Jaipur making wedding arrangements earlier this month. Amboli police caught the burglar, who got out of jail just 15 days prior to the crime, after a dramatic half-kilometre chase through a Versova locality on Saturday.Police said the dog sitter, Suraj Pawar (22), worked for a businessman, J C Rodrigues (65), who deals in vintage cars, for seven months and was let go recently after the pet was moved to the home of the couple's son in Delhi. Another son lives abroad. Only the couple stay in the first floor flat in Teachers Colony in Andheri.
A police officer said Pawar hatched the burglary plan after being fired and continued to work in an adjacent building. "This is the first time we've heard of someone hiring a burglar." Valuables worth Rs 31 lakh have been recovered. Pawar claimed he committed the crime to fund a lavish lifestyle and to pay his bike's EMIs. On Feb 7, Rodrigues and his wife left for Jaipur to book a palace for their son's wedding and gave a spare key to their flat to an employee. When the employee arrived three days later, he couldn't open the door and found it locked from the inside. He alerted Rodrigues and got the door opened with the help of a locksmith. He found that the bedroom was ransacked, the window grille cut, and valuables missing from a cupboard. The police team, supervised by DCP (zone 9) Dikshit Gedam and including senior inspector Pramod Kokate, assistant inspectors Haribhau Biradar and Yogesh Pawar, and SI Sushantkumar Patil, initially hit a wall since the building has no CCTV coverage. It then decided to look into burglars who were recently released from jails and zeroed in on Surya Gounder (22), who has eight cases of house thefts. When police reached Gounder's hideout in Versova, he jumped off a 10ft roof, snaked through lanes and headed for a thicket of mangroves. The police team nabbed him before he could disappear into the mangroves. He revealed Pawar had befriended him while visiting his brother, Jaswant Pawar (22), in prison and offered him a 20% cut for the job.Jaswant and an aide of Gounder, Mudaliyar, were also nabbed. All four suspects are in police custody till Monday.