The police are now looking at CCTV footage to catch the thieves.
Telangana police today said it managed to save all the money robbed by a gang that targetted a State Bank of India ATM by arriving just in time, unlike the pop culture caricature that paints them as a force that always arrives late.
"If our team had been even 30 seconds late, we would have lost the money,'' Jagtial Superintendent of Police Sindhu Sharma told NDTV.
At around 1 am this morning, a gang armed with gas-cutters robbed an ATM and managed to load four boxes full of cash into the boot of their vehicle, all within seven minutes, in Jagtial town. They even sprayed paint on the cameras to avoid identification.
The bank is linked by an alarm system to the nearest police station, where a policeman quickly alerted a patrol party nearby, which arrived in the last 30 seconds of the crime. The ATM robbers tried to flee, but the police rammed their vehicle into the criminals' getaway car head-on and caught them.
Three boxes full of cash fell out by the impact of the collision, and all the cash fell out of the fourth box even as the getaway vehicle dashed off, changing direction, the police said.
The police managed to recover all the cash -- Rs 19,00,200.
The police are now looking at CCTV footage to catch the thieves, who couldn't hold on to the money they robbed.
"We suspect the hand of some interstate gang from Haryana or Uttar Pradesh that are notorious as gas-cutting gangs. Their modus operandi is usually to load the getaway vehicle into a container to avoid detection. We suspect up to 6–7 people may have been involved as we found a couple of people hanging around suspiciously in another CCTV footage from nearby,'' Sindhu Sharma told NDTV.
Usually, criminals tend to target those banks or ATM that are not covered by an alarm system. In this case, they were presumably confident that they could get away before the police reacted.