Police sources said the children accompany gatecrashers to enter high-profile wedding venues—banquet halls, lawns or open grounds—and flee with cash bags and valuables
These four men and an eight-year-old boy were busted by the Kashimira police last December the children in the gang strike when guests are busy cutting cakes or dancing
A bunch of kids and their handlers in a few Madhya Pradesh villages are keeping the city police on their toes. This being the wedding season, police sources said, these children have been trained to steal from glitzy venues. To thwart such attempts, the cops are feverishly working on a plan. In the first of a three-part series, mid-day highlights the menace of these underage sidekicks between April and mid-June.
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Police sources said the children accompany gatecrashers to enter high-profile wedding venues—banquet halls, lawns or open grounds—and flee with cash bags and valuables. Sources said the Crime Branch has prepared a list of history-sheeters using their network of informants and technical data and retrieved the phone numbers of the freshly minted kiddie thieves and the leaders, who are known as the Sisodia gang.
The gang trains children at a few villages in MP and uses to target big fat weddings in Bihar, Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra. Sources said the Maharashtra cops are tracking their active locations on a google map. “In the last one month, their movements have been noticed in Satara, Mahabaleshwar, Kolhapur, Solapur, Dhule, Jalgaon, Nanded, Akola, Navi Mumbai, Mumbai and Thane in Maharashtra where big fat weddings take place,” said a Crime Branch officer from Thane. “As the wedding season approaches, the Sisodia gang members with the trained children fan in small groups across India,” said the officer.
Summer means business
Most Sisodia gang members are from Kadiya Sansi and Gulkhedi villages of MP, said a Crime Branch officer attached to the Mira Bhayandar Vasai Virar police. The gang becomes active only during the summer. Sources said cops find it difficult to enter the villages as the aggressive gang starts pelting stones at them. In some cases, they have fired upon visiting cops and grievously injured them.
Armed with mobile numbers of the gang members, the cops are tracking their live locations
“The wedding crashers, accompanied by trained underage children, enter banquet halls and mix with the guests. People don’t suspect the crooks as they are well-dressed with a gift packet in hand. After a few minutes, the trained tiny thieves sit beside the bride and groom, or at places where valuables or cash bags are kept,” said the officer. “Since family members are often busy during a wedding, the trained children decamp with valuables and the gang members disappear in their getaway cars,” added the officer.
Paid course on stealing
Another Crime Branch officer with Mumbai police said parents of these kids pay between R1 lakh and R5 lakh for the training on how to steal. “Children are sent to these [MP] villages from different parts of India including Delhi, UP, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra. Once they are fully trained they are taken to wedding halls for the crime and later, the booty is shared among them to run their houses,” said the officer, requesting anonymity. “The ganglords enroll children between 12 and 13 years so that they can easily be bailed out if caught by police. These children undergo training of deceiving gullible, pick-pocketing, theft in a crowd, how to tolerate different police methods, and shed crocodile tears,” said the officer.
“The ganglords charge for each trick separately. If some children want to learn all the tricks, their parents will have to pay R5 lakh. After learning one or two tricks, the children continue working with the gang, saving money to learn other tricks of crime,” added the officer. An officer from Thane said they first collected the mobile numbers of the gang leaders and then started analysing their call data records. “This way, we have learnt about their presence in Maharashtra where big weddings generally take place. We have been closely monitoring their movements,” said the officer.
New SIM cards to dodge cops
Crime Branch officers said the gang have become smarter after the cops tracked down them in some cases using their mobile tower locations after crimes at wedding venues. “Now, the thieves don’t come to Maharashtra with SIM cards issued from Madhya Pradesh circle. So, before entering Maharashtra, the kingpins arrange for multiple SIM cards from Delhi and UP to keep their intra-communication alive.
Before executing their theft plan, the gang members switch off their cellphones, remove SIM cards and keep these at their hideouts and enter the wedding halls sans any SIM cards in their handsets so that their cellphone numbers are not reflected during our dump data analysis,” said a Crime Branch officer attached to MBVV police. These gangs also match up with the dress code to evade suspicion. They wear sherwani, kurta-pajama, sarees, chhaniya choli, and shoes and also carry an envelope in their hands after entering wedding venues.
Problem of 5%: NGO
NGO Neenv Social Welfare Association, which is working to improve the lifestyle of poverty-stricken people in rural MP, said that the literacy rate of these two village is around 95 per cent. “But the remaining 5 per cent are hard to be pursued to change their criminal tracks,” said its president Jitendra Sisodia.
“Kadiya Sansi village is located hardly 120 km from Bhopal and Gulkhedi is at the distance of around 180 km from Indore. Most of the people are literate but we are finding it very difficult to bring the illiterate people, who are mostly indulged in theft and pick-pocketing, into the right track,” Sisodia told mid-day. “Whenever we try to convince them to educate their kids, they argue asking ‘if they won’t do these things, how we will run the house?’” he added.
Success in Mira Road
Last December, the Kashimira police arrested four members of Sisodia gang and an 8-year-old child involved in dozens of cases across Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra. The cops found that they had struck at Oshiwara, Santacruz, Bangur Nagar at Malad, Igatpuri and Sahar in the same month.
The arrest was the outcome of the efforts put in by a team led by DCP Amit Kale with the support of ACP Vilas Sanap, senior PI Sanjay Hazare, API Prashant Gangurde, PSI Niri Javed Mulla, constable Kavre, Jarag, Hanumant Tevre, Sameer Yadav, Sudhir Khot, Anil Nagre and Sunny Suryavanshi. API Prashant Gangurde of Kashimira police station said, “The Sisodia gang arrived in Mumbai in a 7-seater Ertiga. They wore good clothes and entered various marriage halls. With the help of the 8-year-old boy, they committed the thefts.”
“The kid would strike only when the groom and bride's family members were busy dancing or cutting cake or involved in any other enjoyment. The boy would pick bags with valuables and flee. We found that the entire village of Kadiya Sansi village was involved in this crime. We recovered R26 lakh of gold and cash from them and detected their role in 7 cases across Mumbai.”
Rs 26L
Cash, valuables recovered from the arrested member by the Kashimira police
7
No. of places where the gang struck last Dec
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