Burglars broke into the compound of the District Cooperative Bank branch at Ayar Bazar in Cholapur overnight into Sunday and used a gas cutter on an iron door inside the building, but by the initial police account they could not pull off a major theft. Senior officers of the Varanasi Commissionerate and a forensic team inspected the branch on Sunday.
The branch falls under the Murdaha police outpost of Cholapur police station, in the rural north of the district. According to the police, the intruders came in from the back of the building. They set a ladder against the rear boundary wall, climbed over it into the premises and then cut through the iron door in the corridor with the cutter.
The break-in came to light on Sunday morning. Deepak Singh, who runs the Gayatri Puja Samagri and Patanjali store close to the branch, was heading to his shop when he noticed that the door to the bank's side lane was open. He also saw what looked like cutting marks on it.
Suspecting a theft, Singh called the branch manager, Sudhir Ranjan, and the cashier, Manish Nayak. Both reached the bank and informed the police. Murdaha outpost in-charge Sandhya Jaiswal arrived with a police team and reported the matter to senior officers.
Police believe the burglars abandoned the job because of regular night patrolling in the area and the sound of a police siren. That explanation has come from the police side and has not been tied to any specific patrol vehicle so far. Officers have not said how long the intruders were inside or at what hour they left.
Given that the target was a bank, the inspection was led from the top of the zone. Deputy Commissioner of Police (Varuna Zone) Rajesh Kumar Pandey and Assistant Commissioner of Police (Sarnath) Vinay Kumar Dwivedi went over the site. A forensic team then lifted fingerprints and collected other evidence from the spot.
The investigation now rests heavily on cameras outside the bank. Police found during their inspection that the branch had no CCTV cameras installed inside its premises, a gap that has raised questions about security at the branch. Teams are going through footage from cameras on nearby shops and along the main road to identify anyone who approached the building at night, and officers have also spoken to bank staff and shopkeepers in the market.
So far, no first information report details, names of suspects or arrests have been made public. Police said the effort to identify and catch the burglars was under way. The bank's officials had not shared any figure for cash or valuables kept at the branch, and none is reported here.
The case stands out for its method rather than its result. The burglars brought a ladder and a cutting torch with them and chose to come in from the rear, away from the market frontage. How many people were involved, and how they reached and left Ayar Bazar, are among the questions investigators will want the footage to answer.
Cooperative bank branches in rural blocks such as Cholapur handle the savings, crop loans and routine transactions of farmers and small traders from the surrounding villages. The Ayar Bazar branch is one such local branch, and a break-in there, even a failed one, brought a DCP, an ACP and a forensic team to the market on the same day.
Financial crime cases elsewhere in the city have kept commissionerate police busy in recent days. Late last month, police registered an FIR over a cash shortfall of Rs 1.71 crore at a hotel in Cantonment, and on 1 October a team in Lanka detained 20 alleged gamblers near the Ramna garbage plant and recovered Rs 1.05 lakh. Those cases involved very different methods and are not linked to Ayar Bazar.
For now the iron door at the Ayar Bazar branch, with its cut edges, is the clearest piece of evidence police have. Whether the cameras on the market road picked up the people who carried the ladder in will decide how quickly the case moves.
