Meerut gang flew to Kerala, shipped bikes by train to steal copper cables
Kerala police arrested 11 members of a Meerut gang who flew to Kochi and Kannur and shipped two-wheelers by train to steal copper cables from BSNL terminals.
A gang of 11 men from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh shipped two-wheelers to Kerala by train and flew down separately to Kochi and Kannur with the aim of stealing copper cables, police said, after arrests across Thrissur and Kannur.
Kannur City Police Commissioner B V Vijaya Bharath Reddy said five members of the gang were held after a patrolling team spotted them under suspicious circumstances on Sunday night and found cable cutters concealed on their bodies. The five had landed at Kannur airport from Delhi on September 19, while their motorcycles had reached Kannur by rail on September 9.
The arrests followed an alert from Thrissur City Police, where the gang was first noticed on the morning of September 20. Four men were seen near a BSNL cable terminal box wearing the yellow safety helmets commonly used by construction workers. Locals grew suspicious when the men began filling bags with copper cables and alerted the police. The group tried to flee but was caught.
According to the FIR registered in Thrissur, the gang had removed cables worth Rs 12,000 and badly damaged the cable network by the time it was intercepted.
Investigators found that six members had flown to Kochi on September 19, of whom four travelled on to Thrissur. Bikes had been dispatched to Kerala before the group boarded its flight from Delhi. The remaining members were arrested under the Kalamassery police limits in Kochi city after a tip-off from Thrissur.
Questioning indicated the gang targeted buildings and BSNL terminal boxes for copper cables, planning to dispose of the metal in Kerala and fly back to Uttar Pradesh, staying in hotels in between. The two-wheelers sent by rail were meant to help the group move around, the commissioner said.
With BSNL having shifted its network from copper to optical fibre, surplus copper cables have become a valuable but non-utilisable resource for the telecom company, which has been working to recover and auction such cables. The metal's significant scrap value makes abandoned cable networks an attractive target for thieves.
Police have registered a case of robbery and invoked sections of the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act and the Telecommunications Act. The accused held in Kochi were handed over to Thrissur police.