Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Blame it on Roxy. Days after the sensational burglary of Rabindranath Tagore8217;s Nobel medallion at Santiniketan museum on March 25, 2004, investigators discovered a pair of rubber gloves tucked away under a shrub near the theft site. Roxy, part of the CBI sniffer team, was pressed into service. The German Shepherd took a purposeful round of the ground floor museum and suddenly jumped out of the window through which the burglars had broken into the museum.
Roxy had picked up the scent, the case would soon be cracked, investigators thought. The dog darted through a hole in the barbed wire fence and headed for a dense clump of trees. As the dog came dashing in, the forest came alive. Monkeys panicked, chattered and squealed. Roxy stopped in his tracks. He looked bewildered and turned his attention on the monkeys. The chase ended there, never to pick pace. A few arrests and three years later, the CBI asked for the case of the missing Nobel to be closed.
The heist
On March 25, 2004, Bhagendra Jha, the caretaker at the Rabindra Bhavan Museum in Santiniketan, opened the gates of Bichitra, the building that houses the museum, after the weekly break. Minutes after he went in, he came rushing out: the museum had been broken into and 43 precious items were missing. Among them was the Nobel medallion awarded to Rabindranath Tagore in 1913. The robbers also took away a gold pocket-watch, Tagore8217;s ring, several paintings, silverware, ivory items, jewellery and a sari that belonged to Tagore8217;s wife Mrinalini Devi.
Investigators of the state Criminal Investigation Department found out that the robbers entered the museum through a window on the ground floor. The burglars broke the locks on the glass cases, collected the loot and walked out 8212; the burglar alarms at Bichitra hadn8217;t been working for a year and it was easy to give the two armed security personnel at the museum the slip.
On March 30, five days after the burglary was discovered, the case was handed over to the CBI. A 20-member team headed by a joint director of the CBI, Vivek Dubey, and DSP M.S. Khan visited Santiniketan, joined sleuths of the CBI8217;s special crime branch in Kolkata. A team of forensic experts from the Central Forensic Laboratory reached the spot. The team camped in Uttarayan, one of the houses the poet lived in while in Santiniketan.
On April 4, the CBI sleuths said the plot was hatched at an abandoned guesthouse yards away from the museum. From the paan pouches that were strewn on the verandah and three empty beer bottles, the investigators concluded that three burglars had spent a few hours on the verandah of the guesthouse before striking.
The CBI probed the insider theory by detaining three university guards 8212; Andagopal Sinha, Nepal Das and Debojyoti Ghosh. When that failed to yield anything, the agency on April 4, 2004, announced Rs 10 lakh to anyone who could provide information on the theft. 8220;Calls poured in, but led to nothing. Everyday we would receive over a dozen phone calls. Some calls were made to settle scores. Some gave baseless information. Some even gave us a lecture on how to proceed with the investigation and others played pranks,8221; said a CBI officer who was part of the probe team.
Among the people interrogated were one of the former vice chancellors of the university, Dilip Sinha, and Kamal Bhattacharjee, a research scholar working on the Nobel medallion. A month after the burglary, Bhattacharjee was found roaming the university campus drenched in blood 8212; his wrists and neck had been slashed. He was interrogated too but that led nowhere.
As part of the investigations, the CBI busted a number of antique smuggling gangs across the country. But the Nobel eluded them. In September 2005, a Bhagalpur-based gang was caught selling a Tibetan manuscript. In July that year, the CBI caught two men in Goa trying to sell antique idols. Again, everything but the Nobel.
Case shut
Three years later, the CBI sought the closure of the case. Senior CBI officials say the prayer for closure was a 8220;legal necessity8221; 8212; Section 167 of the CrPC states that the investigation should be concluded within three years 8212; and claim the investigation would continue.
Status
Tagore8217;s Nobel medallion lost forever.
