New Delhi: From investigator to suspect: Railway policeofficer probing ₹1.44-cr train gold heist held
On November 21, a passenger stepped off a train at Howrah, lighter by gold biscuits worth ₹1.44 crore that he had left with 14 hours ago. The men who took it allegedly wore police uniforms, he told the authorities. Initially, the case seemed routine – one of thousands of robberies that unfortunately blight the railways in India.
A month on, however, investigators have arrested the man who was supposed to be in charge of solving the crime, the station house officer of the GRP police station.
Rajesh Kumar Singh’s arrest has turned the robbery on its head, recasting it from a case of rogue constables to what officers now say was a carefully coordinated operation involving policemen and civilian insiders.
On November 20, Kolkata-based gold trader Manoj Soni asked his staffer Dhananjay Shashwat to carry the gold biscuits and handover to another Jaipur-based trader. Shashwat boarded the Howrah-Bikaner-Jodhpur Express at 11.30 PM on November 20. At Gaya junction, roughlyfive-and-a-half-hour into the journey, four men dressed as police constables boarded the 3-AC coach and two of them allegedly sat next to Shashwat, questioning him about the gold.
“Somewhere between Koderma and Gaya, the cops pulled the chain and got down with Shashwat. They all travelled by autorickshaw and later by Bolero Jeep to reach Manpur in Gaya at the water bottling plant,” Shashwat said in his complaintwhich HT has seen.
Shashwat told police that a goldsmith was already present at Manpur with another person and after examining gold, it was broken into pieces. “Then Shashwat was brought back to Gaya Junction and sent to Howrah in another train,” he added.
Shashwat reached Howrah on November 21 and told Soni about the robbery the same day. The first information report was registered at Malipanchgora police station in Howrah under BNS Section 227 and 229 (giving false evidence), 318 (cheating) and others.
For days, the focus remained on the four constables, who were unidentified initially. They were suspended and soon went missing. Two civilians — Parvez Alam and former GRP driver Sitaram — were also identified as part of the plot.
Soni refused to accept Shashwat’s account at face value. He filed a complaint, alleging that his staffer himself may have been complicit. As Shashwat repeated his statement to police, Soni escalated the matter to senior railway police officers. Still, there was little visible movement. The constables were named on December 30.
Soni got another complaint lodged with the railway SP on November 27 in Patna, who forwarded it to Gaya rail police for further action on November 28. Seven days after the robbery, Soni approached Rajesh Verma, the MP from Khagaria. Shortly after, a special investigation team was formed.
“The arrests came after technical evidence, call detail records, tower location and other investigations revealed their involvement. The SIT constituted on the instructions of the Railway SP started a layer-by-layer investigation into the entire case,” said an official familiar with the matter, requesting anonymity.
On Wednesday, Rajesh Singh was summoned to Patna and questioned for nearly eight hours. By evening, he was under arrest. He was later produced before a railway judicial magistrate and remanded to judicial custody in Gaya.
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