INDIA CYBER CAFE OWNER ARRESTED FOR PURCHASING STOLEN COMPUTERS The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Metro | Burglary racket bust

Burglary racket bust

A STAFF REPORTER

Tirtha Chakrabarty, who runs a cyber café from his home in Harinavi, was arrested on Monday for allegedly using stolen computers. According to police, Chakrabarty, in his mid-30s, had been buying computers stolen by a gang of three for several months. Sambhu Das, Suren Dutta and Suresh Sharma — the trio — are from Sonarpur, on the southern fringes of the city. A week back, the police rounded up Dutta and Sharma, both middle-aged, in connection with a theft at Beleghata Railway Quarters on the basis of information provided by 23-year-old Das, who had been arrested earlier in connection with a theft case in the same area. During interrogation, the three told the police that they have been stealing computers and selling them to Chakrabarty. “We know of six cases of computer lifting carried out by the gang across the city. All the stolen computers were sold to Chakrabarty,” said city detective chief Jawed Shamim. Dutta and Sharma said that they teamed up with Das and started stealing computers in November 2006. They reportedly stole their first computer from a house on Nasiruddin Road, under Karaya police station. “Two months later, the gang broke into a doctor’s house in Bhowanipore. They then stole from a Montessori school in Beniapukur. The men even broke into acomputer shop on Mission Row and decamped with two computers,” said an officer. The three would even steal the keyboards of the computers and hand them over to Chakrabarty, who paid between Rs 5,000 and Rs 6,000 for each computer, said police. The price would be higher for new computers. “It is possible that the gang had stolen many more computers and we need time to find out if they were involved in other thefts as well. We are investigating if the gang had supplied computers to other cyber café owners in the city,” said an officer of the detective department.