Shimla burglary, Rudrapur chase: The twist nobody saw coming

When she woke up at 8 am on September 8, Renu Baljees could suddenly feel something was off. For one thing, it was an hour and a half later than usual, and her body refused to move – unusual for this active 76-year-old. For another, her three-storey house in the upscale, picturesque Fingask Estate locality adjoining Shimla’s iconic Mall Road was deathly quiet. Her first thought was: why didn’t the alarm go off this morning?

But as she strolled through the house, the reason became increasingly clear: the battery to the alarm had been pulled out, and her cordless phone was missing. And once she stepped into another room, everything started to make perfect sense. The room had been completely ransacked. She had been robbed of valuables – later estimated to be worth Rs 1 crore.

“My phone was gone. I had no way of communicating,” she says. “I had a bell that connected me to my bakery on the ground floor; I rang it. The staff quickly came up. They found a maid lying unconscious after she was knocked down. Another maid was missing. All my valuables had been stolen.” The missing maid, Karishma, who was originally from Nepal, had been hired only ten days ago.

What followed was still strange. During the investigation, police found that Karishma and her three accomplices had allegedly been intercepted by uniformed personnel at Uttarakhand’s Rudrapur while fleeing towards Nepal, and the jewellery was taken by the officials. The recovery of the jewellery from Karishma wasn’t, however, reported to the police.

On September 22, police arrested four excise officials. They have now been released on bail. “We are investigating if there was an organised network involved,” one officer says.

The burglary

Ever since her husband died in 1996, Renu knew how to live alone, caring for her two daughters and running the family bakery. Now 76, and with her daughters abroad, Renu increasingly relies on her staff: her assistants at the bakery and her live-in domestic help.

According to the police, Renu had placed a request for a maid through an online placement agency. She, however, denies this, claiming instead that she received “repeated WhatsApp calls from a man who claimed he could provide trustworthy help”.

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On August 27, Karishma, a woman originally from Nepal, arrived at Renu’s house with only a rucksack in tow. Slim, dressed in trousers and a T-shirt, with her long hair tied in a bun, she was unassuming – and fit right in.

“The man had shared a copy of the contract between him and me, along with Karishma’s identity proof, on WhatsApp,” she says. “But police verification was always on my mind, and I kept asking her for documents. She kept evading it by telling me she would send them to me later, and that her brother and sister-in-law would bring them when they came down on September 7, but it never happened. She also sent me her number, but that’s been switched off since. Later, I realised that the copy of the contract and Karishma’s identity proof have since disappeared from my WhatsApp chat.”

A CCTV recording from the time of the burglary allegedly showed Karishma entering the house with three accomplices – all men — and leaving with what police suspect was the loot. The FIR initially estimated the jewellery to be worth Rs 1 crore, although Renu now claims that this value is conservative.

But as the investigation progressed, there was another development that has since left investigators puzzled.

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On September 10 – two days after the burglary – Renu received a call from a woman who introduced herself as Karishma’s older sister. According to investigators, the call came from a Nepal number.

“She came straight to the point. She sought my forgiveness for what had occurred, and told me that some uniformed people had intercepted her sister and her accomplices at Rudrapur and took all the valuables from them,” she says.

Located in Udham Singh Nagar district of neighbouring Uttarakhand, Rudrapur is a popular transit point for travellers going towards the western Nepal border.

It’s still unclear who this caller was — or how she knew that Karishma and her accomplices had been intercepted at Rudrapur. But for investigators, this puzzling call served to confirm a thread they were already pulling at – a white taxi that the group had allegedly taken out to Uttarakhand on September 8 and which was also captured on CCTV.

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“The call was significant, but by then, one of our teams had reached Uttarakhand chasing the taxi. We were also coordinating with the police in Rudrapur,” the officer says.

The taxi driver, investigators later allegedly found, was originally from Nepal but had no known connection to the suspects. He became the key to solve this puzzle. “The taxi driver’s testimony helped us establish what happened, and he played a crucial role in identifying the four officials (at the Rudrapur border crossing). He’s now a witness,” the officer says.

The probe

On September 22, the Shimla Police took custody of the four personnel from Uttarakhand Police. While two — Sub-Inspector Devendra Kumar and Constable Baljit Singh – are from the excise department, the others have been identified as Uttarakhand Purv Sainik Kalyan Nigam employee Pappu Lal and Naeem, a personnel with the auxiliary volunteer force, the Prantiya Rakshak Dal. Both Lal and Naeem were attached to the excise department at the time of the incident.

At the same time, the investigators are now pursuing some more suspects – those involved in the original burglary, and the missing woman Excise constable they believe was part of the group that intercepted the quartet in Rudrapur.

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Investigators say that Karishma and her three accomplices, who committed the burglary in Renu’s house, are from Nepal.

“We’re trying to trace the (Excise) constable and establish her role in the events of that day,” the officer says. “We believe they are all hiding in Nepal now”.

The role of the man, who claimed to be from the online placement service and had arranged the job for Karishma at Renu’s house, is also under scrutiny. His phone is now switched off, police say. Karishma’s phone too isn’t working.

Investigators suspect that Karishma may have sedated both Renu and her other live-in house help, to make an easy getaway. Renu claims her food was spiked.

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“Anjali, who has been working with me for many years, is the one who cooked the food – chapatis and sabzi. Anjali and I both ate that food that night. Karishma didn’t,” Renu says.

The police claim 80% of the stolen jewellery items have been recovered – an assessment Renu disagrees with. “We are now trying to find out if they were all part of an elaborate network that provides maids and robs them, or if the personnel were simply there, took the stolen loot and allowed them to enter Nepal and disappear.”

Back at her Fingask Estate house, Renu has been shaken by the incident. But even during this traumatic time, she has turned to a person she trusts the most, her old help, Anjali.

“I know that I’m not alone in feeling like this,’’ she says. “Here, you’ll find families that have domestic help, who have been working for a family for years. This must also have shaken them”.