Diesel theft: Man in police net

Praveen Kumar | NT Bengaluru, Nov. 4  

With diesel prices soar- ing, an employee of a private mobile network tower  decided to make some quick buck by stealing the costly fuel from the mobile  towers of his own company.

However, he got caught  red-handed in his very first attempt. The accused had joined the company just a few days back as a trainee. He told police that he wanted to make easy money by  selling diesel at a discount- ed price to lorry drivers on  the busy Bengaluru-Chikk- aballapura Road. Mobile  towers need diesel to run power generation sets in case of a power failure. The incident happened  on November 1 when the price of diesel was still Rs 104.47. It has been reduced to Rs 81.50 in Karnataka with effect from Thursday evening. The incident happened  on the Bengaluru-Chikka- ballapura Road near K.N.  Halli. The arrested employ- ee has been identified as K.  Murali, a resident of Chikkaballapura.

The person was caught  red-handed by the compa- ny’s patrolling supervisor  R Narasimha Murthy at 11.20 pm on Monday, and  handed over to the juris- dictional police on Tues- day morning.  “Murthy immediately  called the cluster lead engi- neer BV Rajappa and in- formed him about the die- sel theft attempt. The  accused had come on a bike with a can and a pipe  to draw diesel from the mo- bile towers,” said a police  officer. Rajappa reported the matter to his seniors and based on their direction he  filed a police complaint.

The police have recovered the bike, the can and other items from the accused. Murali had approached Rajappa a month ago seek- ing a job due to his poor  financial background. Ra- jappa had sent him to get  trained about operating the mobile towers. A case of theft (IPC 379) and other sections of IPC has been registered against the accused.