The police have constituted 9 special teams to track down the gang which stole more than Rs 72 lakh from 4 ATMs in Tiruvannamalai town, Kalasapakkam and Polur towns on Saturday night, North zone IG Kannan revealed on Monday.
Refusing to state where exactly the special teams have gone, he said release of such information would be inimical to the investigations, but assured that results would be revealed in a few days.
All the affected ATMs were closed. However, police were concentrating on the possible routes the culprits might have used to escape into either Andhra Pradesh or Karnataka through Vellore, Ranipet or Tirupattur districts and hence intensive checking was continued at the border check posts as also at the toll plaza at Pallikonda, 20 km from Vellore, on the Chennai–Bengaluru National Highway.
Vellore range DIG MS Muthusamy said based on the welding machine used, it would have taken them around 15 minutes to cut into a machine. “We are undertaking investigating on this angle,” he said. All four ATMs were broken into within two hours it was said.
DGP C Sylendra Babu had held a meeting with 51 senior executives of various banks on Monday and advised them to use high-definition CCTV systems at ATM kiosks besides telling them to save the feeds in cloud storage rather than in hard disks.
The state head of the police force also told the bankers to make the surveillance in a discreet manner with the use of cameras that can capture the face of people clearly entering the kiosk.
Sylendra Babu also asked the bank officials to link the burglar alarms fixed in the ATMs to the nearest police station so that police also get alerted when the alarm goes off. “If the surveillance camera feed are stored in cloud storage intruders will not able to take it away,” DGP noted.
Bank officials had promised to implement the instruction from the police chief in letter and spirit.
