Hot pursuit: Suspected chain snatcher tracked down after 25 years

Bengaluru: A 48-year-old man has been tracked down 25 years after he allegedly jumped bail in a chain-snatching case. 

Police traced him to Ramanagara and arrested him on February 3. 

Police said Gulab Khan snatched a woman's chain in southern Bengaluru's Jayanagar in 1998 and was arrested. He later secured bail, but skipped court hearings. 

Following the chain-snatching, Jayanagar police arrested Khan, but he secured bail in 2000. However, fearing conviction and imprisonment, he skipped court hearings and left Bengaluru to settle in Ramanagara, according to police. 

Khan became a reformed man and stayed away from crimes. He worked as a labourer and took up manual jobs. He got a job as a contract labourer at the Ramanagara City Municipal Council and settled down there with his family. He had almost forgotten about the case when the police swooped down upon him, an officer close to the investigation said. 

Last year, Bengaluru Police Commissioner B Dayananda asked his officers to solve cases in the Long Pending Register (LPR). 

While revisiting proclamation warrants from the court, Jayanagar police came across Khan’s case, which has been pending in the second ACMM court for more than two decades. 

Police put a field team to scour through documents on the suspect's whereabouts and collect his personal details. "Building on the basics led us to his present location," an officer from the Jayanagar police station told DH. 

A team of police officers was subsequently sent to arrest him on February 3. Khan reportedly confessed he was the one they had been looking for. A court has placed him in judicial custody for 15 days. 

Khan is not the first person who has fallen into the police net after being on the run for years. 

In 2023, Bengaluru police cleared 99 LPR cases, arresting suspects in cases registered more than three decades ago. 

In December, Kamakshipalya police arrested a suspect in a theft case registered in 1999. The suspect, originally from Alur taluk in Hassan district, had been working at a restaurant in the court complex where his case was heard and a proclamation order against him was issued.