Coimbatore’s ‘Spiderman’ jewel thief had a modest demand: ‘Stole only for Rs 1 lakh; didn’t need more’

Police knew then that this burglar, who they named ‘Spiderman’, wouldn’t be an easy catch.

Coimbatore Police Commissioner V Balakrishnan said five teams were formed to nab Vijay. “Within 24 hours of the theft, we recovered most of the stolen items and arrested Vijay’s wife, but he remained at large until Monday (December 11). We set up five teams, involved 47 policemen, and sifted through evidence from over 350 CCTV cameras,” he said. Vijay’s wife is in prison along with their three-month-old baby.

Deputy Commissioner of Police G Chandeesh, who led the investigation, said that after his wife’s arrest, Vijay escaped to his home district of Dharmapuri. “He is very familiar with the Dharmapuri forest area and it was tough for us to catch up with him. Our teams spotted him twice but he managed to give us the slip,” he said.

From Dharmapuri, Vijay went to Nellore, Kalahasti, Tirupati, and finally to Chennai. Since he had thrown away his phone, police placed a number of his close friends and relatives under surveillance. The first breakthrough came on the morning of December 11, when Vijay borrowed the phone of a panipuri seller on Chennai’s Marina Beach to call one of his friends.

“We reached the panipuri seller, who said that a man clad in the black of Sabarimala pilgrims had borrowed his phone to make a call,” said DCP Chandeesh. The police team combed the beach and the surrounding areas, but failed to find him.

In less than an hour, Vijay dialed a relative. The location was traced to Mylapore. This time, he had borrowed a passerby’s phone. There were more calls to Vijay’s friends and relatives, but they were all from random numbers, setting the police off on a wild goose chase for several hours.

The next call, made to a friend, was from Koyambedu, a Chennai neighbourhood. As the police listened in, they picked a vital clue: Vijay planned to buy a SIM card soon. An undercover police team rushed to Koyambedu, where they stationed themselves at all cellphone shops in the neigbourhood. Finally, police found their man. Wearing a pair of skinny jeans and a navy blue shirt, Vijay was at one of the cellphone shops, waiting to get a new SIM card.

During interrogation, Vijay, who worked as a cleaner in buses and lorries in Coimbatore, told police that he stole some sovereigns since his goal was rather modest: he needed Rs 1 lakh so that he could pay a friend and get his house on lease in the Anamalai area of Coimbatore. “He thought it was a better option than paying rent,” Chandeesh said.

Vijay also told police that jewellery theft was never on his mind; his original plan was to steal cellphones since “selling stolen phones was easier than getting rid of stolen jewels”.

However, the two mobile shops he targeted weren’t safe to rob — there were too many people milling around on the nights he attempted to steal. It was on one of these nights, while walking down 100 Feet Road, that he noticed the plywood portion on the wall of the Jos Alukkas jewellery store. He soon managed to break the false wall and enter the narrow gap. In the pitch darkness of the cavity, he saw a ray of light above. And then, he began his climb, sliding up using iron rods that stuck out dangerously. Soon, he was on the third floor of the showroom.

Luckily for him, the burglar alarm at the store was under maintenance that day.

He looked around, hoping to find some cash. “He found a lot of gold, about 30-40 kg of it, and diamonds, but he wasn’t interested in taking that much. He only wanted Rs 1 lakh, but when he failed to find any cash, he decided to take a small quantity of gold,” said an officer.

Days after the heist, police traced him to his friend’s house in Anamalai, but Vijay had given them the slip, executing a dramatic escape by scaling a 15-foot-high wall to get to the roof, where he removed a single mud tile, and vanished through the narrow opening. According to the police, another team of theirs had arrived at the spot a few hours earlier in connection with a bike theft case and Vijay had panicked and fled.

Police said Vijay went to great lengths to evade the police because “someone had misinformed him that the jail term for a jewellery theft is 15-20 years”. If convicted, the officers said, the maximum prison term he faces is six years.