Gurugram lift-and-loot gang rented cars from Nuh and Sohna to commit crimes
The modus operandi of these gangs involved paying around ₹5,000 for a night to the car owners and then using their cars to abduct commuters and loot them. This was revealed during questioning of one of the gang members, Arshad Khan (28), who was arrested by Delhi Police on Monday.
The gang allegedly involved in lift-and-loot cases on the Delhi-Gurugram Expressway used to rent cars from residents of five to six villages in Nuh and Sohna, Delhi police maintained.
The modus operandi of these gangs involved paying around ₹5,000 for a night to the car owners and then using their cars to abduct commuters and loot them. This was revealed during questioning of one of the gang members, Arshad Khan (28), who was arrested by Delhi Police Monday. He has been remanded in police custody for three days and is being questioned at Vasant Kunj police station.
His questioning also revealed that the gang members kept their victims hostage for seven to eight hours so that their ATM and credit cards could be swiped twice — once before and once after midnight — to get the maximum amount of money.
Officers said the villagers from whom the vehicles were taken on rent were not aware that their cars were being used to commit crimes. It has also been found that the gang had four members — all of whom police have identified. All of them owned cars, which were attached with car aggregators.
“These criminals hardly repeated any car twice for committing crime. This was done mainly to evade arrest. They also chose their victims carefully and struck only after carrying out a thorough recce of the spot,” said Sandeep Kumar Suthar from Vasant Kunj police station (south), the investigating officer.
Delhi Police said they had recovered CCTV footage from different spots and identified three suspects involved in at least 20 lift-and-loot cases in Gurugram and Delhi.
Police said there are at least three different gangs operating on the NH-8 .
“These criminals don’t carry firearms but prefer to hit their victims with blunt weapons to instil fear in them. They mainly want to snatch valuables and ATM cards. They also don’t want to kill anyone as this would entail police getting after them. They sometimes use laptop battery posing as gun along with the real country-made revolver, which they keep in the car dashboard,” said Suthar.
Police said all four of these criminals are married and under heavy debt. They had borrowed money to buy cabs from different sources and had even pawned the family jewellery. Therefore, they wanted to earn quick money.
The gang members hit roads after 10 pm, police said, adding that if they used their own cars for the crimes, they would switch off the GPS so that cab aggregators could not identify the cabs plying on the road, police said. The police are yet to reach out to the cab aggregators.
“They used to take the victims towards Nuh from Sohna and left them either on the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal(KMP) Expressway or an isolated stretch near Golf Course Road and in the outskirts of the city,” said Suthar.