Now, muggers don’t spare even kids

Robbers are not sparing even children. Two suspected muggers snatched a seven-year-old girl’s purse near the Mysuru Road bus station, West Bengaluru. But their luck ran out soon as their scooter skidded and alert auto drivers chased them down.

The purse belonged to the girl’s mother and contained a new mobile phone, a debit card and other valuables. The incident occurred around 4 am on Wednesday.

The girl, her parents and four-year-old brother had returned from Mysuru and gotten off at the traffic signal outside the bus station. Her father had parked his two-wheeler at the bus station. He walked to the parking lot to get the two-wheeler and asked his wife and kids to follow him.

But crossing the raised road divider proved difficult for them. The girl’s mother, Hina Tharanum, 28, decided to stay near an auto stand and asked her husband to get the two-wheeler from the bus station. Hina held her son in her arms and gave her purse to her daughter. It then started raining, and the family took shelter under a closed shop.

Minutes later, a man talking on the phone walked up to the family and brandished a dagger. Before Hina could do anything, he snatched the purse from the seven-year-old and ran to a scooter where an accomplice was waiting for him. The duo rode off in a jiffy.

Hina raised an alarm. A few auto drivers quickly came up to her and asked what happened. Some of them asked Hina to forget the mugging, saying such incidents occurred almost daily. But a few others decided to chase the muggers.

As luck would have it, the suspects’ scooter skidded off the road and they fell down. By this time, the auto drivers were breathing down their neck. They called the police, and a Hoysala patrol car arrived at the spot minutes later. The duo, identified as Tanveer and Salim, both 30 and from the nearby Gangondanahalli, were booked under IPC section 397 (robbery with an attempt to cause death or serious hurt).

Speaking to DH, Hina said her first reaction was to protect her daughter. “The mugger was obviously watching us but I didn’t notice him,” she said, adding she decided to file a police complaint because she didn’t want the suspects to rob others.