Pramesh S Jain & Yogesh K Porwar
T
he SR Nagar police on Sunday arrested a gang of five including two from Telangana while trying to sell the Buddha statue outside a hotel on RRMR road .
The accused identified as Panchamurthy Raghu,45, Uday Kumar,37,Freddy Dsouza,44,Sharan Nayar,41 and Prasanna MK,39 were caught red handed minutes before they were handing over the idol to their clients .
The SR Nagar police recovered 38 Cm statue kept in a suitcase which according to the police is 200 year old.
Probe revealed that the accused had bought the statue from their contact identified as Srikanth from Hyderabad for a price of Rs.30 lakh and smuggled into city to sell it to their clients for over Rs.1 Crore .
The police suspect that the accused had stolen the idol from somewhere and efforts are on to track down Srikanth to ascertain the source .
The police are now seeking the help of experts from archaeology department for their expert opinion on the seized idol.
Finally Bengaluru Police Commissioner,CH Pratap Reddy has appreciated Addl CP West,Sandeep Patil,DCP Central,Srinivas Gowda,ACP, Narayanaswamy V,PI,Harish Kumar MA,PSIs,as,Shivakumar G,Tirupati KV,and crime staff as,Muniraj,Chandrashekar,Vinod Chouhan,Basappa,Vijay Kumar,and others has been appreciated for the excellent investigation done by them in nabbing the five member gang a suitable reward will be given to whole team he added.
