ATM broken with gas cutter, Rs 2.9L stolen

Thieves broke an Axis Bank ATM with a gas cutter and stole Rs 2.9 lakh in cash on Monday night, police said. The ATM kiosk in southern Bengaluru neither had CCTV cameras nor a security guard or the panic button.

The theft surfaced on Tuesday after customers complained to the bank that the ATM located at Shastri Nagar near Banashankari 2nd Stage was out of order. Arun, an ATM engineer, asked Shanthaveer Gowda, an employee of the cash management company responsible for replenishing the machine, to go check the kiosk.

Gowda went to the kiosk around 12.45 pm and found that the ATM had been broken with a gas cutter. A total of Rs 2,89,500 in cash was missing. He also noticed that no CCTV camera was installed inside and outside the kiosk nor was there any security guard or the panic button.

All of these things were made mandatory in ATMs after Jyothi Uday, a Corporation Bank manager, was brutally attacked inside a cash machine kiosk near the BBMP head office in November 2013. The then police commissioner, Raghavendra H Auradkar, had issued a circular in this regard.

More than 1,000 ATMs were closed at that time for not following the directions.