In a broad daylight heist, five armed men, one of them in police uniform, escaped with jewellery worth lakhs of rupees from PC Jewellers in Sector 14. The robbers, accompanied with a handcuffed man, pretended they were looking for a criminal.

They fired in the air and fled with everything they could lay their hands on. The robbers, who came in a Hyundai Verna car bearing a fake registration number, successfully managed to escape, leaving the police searching for ‘vital clues’ in the CCTV footage, captured by the cameras installed inside and outside the showroom.

How it happened
10:45 am: There were about a dozen employees in the shop preparing for the day ahead when the robbers struck. Amit Kumar, an employee, told Newsline that the men declared it was a police raid. “One of the robbers asked us about a woman called Geeta. He said they had brought the handcuffed man as part of the investigation of a case. When we said there was no Geeta here, the men suddenly fired in the air and committed the robbery.” One of the robbers, eyewitnesses said, put a pistol to the head of the showroom gunman and snatched away his rifle. The five men, one of them turbaned, looked to be in their early twenties, eyewitnesses told the police.

10.46-49 am: While three of the five men looted the shop, the other two kept their guns pointed towards those present in the shop.

10.50 am: One of the employees pressed the alarm. The robbers immediately collected their bags and fled in their car.

10.54 am: The Panchkula police reached the spot and initiated investigations. Messages were flashed to all police control rooms in the tricity and the neighbouring states.

Talking to Newsline, DSP Varinder Singh said the entire district was sealed soon after the heist and efforts were on to nab the accused at the earliest.

Later in the evening, PC Jewellers MD Balram Garg estimated the loss around Rs 1.7 crore. He added that clear pictures of the accused from the CCTV cameras have been retrieved by a technical expert from Delhi.

Target gold
This is the second such case of robbery within a week in Panchkula where thieves came incognito and decamped with jewellery. On January 22, a gang of four people drugged two employees of a jewellery shop in Amritsar and robbed them of gold ornaments worth around Rs 30 lakh in Sector 20.