It was a field day or rather night for thieves at Panchkula. They struck at eight showrooms in various city markets during the intervening night of Friday and Saturday and decamped with cash and goods worth lakhs of rupees. While the police are clueless about the series of thefts,the shopkeepers staged protests against the cops at Sectors 11 and 15 and blocked two roads for almost an hour. The series of thefts caused a scare among residents. While the police have failed to provide security to the business community,the other worrying fact is that we have six ATMs in the market and every one has a security guard. I wonder where they were when the burglars were cutting the shutters? said Sector 11 Market Committee Spokesperson Karan Narola. The police said that two of the eight thefts took place in Sector 11,one each in Sectors 9 and 10,and four in Sector 15. In most of the cases,the locks of the shops were broken while in Sector 11 the shutter of the showroom was cut with a gas cutter. The two locks of my shop were surprisingly intact and the shutter was broken in the middle with a gas cutter. They looted the shop and also decamped with cash, said the Akarshan gift gallery owner Rakesh Goyal. I was told about the theft by a neighbouring shopkeeper in the morning. Goyal informed that cash and goods worth Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 3 lakhs were stolen from his showroom. He has CCTV cameras installed at the shop but had switched off the power connection on Friday evening. In the same market,cash worth Rs 25,000 was stolen from a shop of Dhutt Ply House. Here the locks were broken. In Sector 15,cash from four shops was stolen after breaking the locks. Interestingly,a watchman was deployed in the market but had no idea about the thefts. Cash worth Rs 40,000-50,000 was stolen from Patiala departmental store,Rs 5,000 from Rikki Collection,and Rs 14,000-20,000 from Chitkara departmental store. Here the burglars did not steal any goods from the shops. The thefts at Sector 15 had taken place between 4.20 am and 4.30 am. A person who had come to the Punjab and Sind Bank ATM in the market to withdraw money said that he saw a few people outside my shop with torches. But he thought they were shopkeepers. However,when he headed towards his car after withdrawing the money,he saw them running towards a car. He got suspicious and called the police, said Rikki,the owner of Rikki collections. The burglars also made an unsuccessful attempt to break the lock of a ninth shop. Panchkula MLA D K Bansal met the market committees of Sectors 11 and 15. He asked the police to beef up security at Panchkula during night hours to ensure that further incidents do not take place.
