HYDERABAD: An interstate car thief suspected to be involved in multiple thefts is being chased by cops from the three city commissionerates for a while. The suspect, Satyendra Singh Shekhawat from Jaipur, who has an MBA to boot, had been arrested earlier in Delhi, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Cops here are yet to lay hands on him.
The elusive thief uses guile and has a sophisticated modus operandi, cops said.
“Shekhawat gets access to car keys at valet parking or service stations and scans them using a device. He prepares duplicate keys using electronic key cutters, tracks car on GPS and lifts them,” a cop said.
His work came to city police notice for the first time in January 2021 during a probe into the theft of a Toyota Fortuner from a star hotel in Road No. 2, Banjara Hills. The car belonged to Kannada film producer V Manjunath and was lifted on January 26 from hotel parking where the driver had left it.
CCTV footage helped identify Shekhawat and a team of Banjara Hills police landed at his house in Jaipur and met his father, an ex-service man. “We camped in Jaipur for a week. He even contacted on phone and offered to surrender. But he didn’t turn up,” said a cop.
While Banjara Hills cops were still looking for him, Shekhawat came to city and drove off an Isuzu pick-up truck from the house of a software engineer in Nacharam in April.
Now, it was the turn of Nacharam cops to go Jaipur, but they came back empty-handed too. “We had proof against Shekhawat’s wife for assisting him and we arrested her. We sought a transit warrant, but she got bail from a local court,” said a Nacharam cop.
While Hyderabad and Rachakonda cops are still searching for leads, an Isuzu V Cross was stolen in a similar fashion from a gated community at Bowrampet in Cyberabad on August 5.
The vehicle belongs to a pharma company and used by its assistant vice president PB Ravindra Varma. Dundigal police of Cyberabad have now registered a theft case.
