CHENNAI: Police have launched intensive enumeration of north Indian construction workers in the southern suburbs in a bid to nab four Hindi-speaking men, who had looted a bank at Perungudi on Monday.The move came after probe showed that about 75 per cent of the account-holders at Bank of Baroda’s branch on Rajiv Gandhi Salai, where the heist took place, were from Bihar, Bengal, Orissa and Jharkhand. They worked at different construction sites in the area and were paid weekly wages. “They came to the bank every week to deposit the amount and also make electronic transfer to their native states,” a senior police official told Express.Police, therefore, suspect that the north Indian quartet could have been either account-holders or their friends. Pointing out that the they had not even bothered to mask their faces, the officer said: “Their comings and goings must have made them aware that the bank neither had CCTVs nor a security guard,” the officer said. “They must have even counted the 18 steps leading to the bank on the first floor and that the cashier operated from an open hall and not from inside a locked cabin.”The special teams got their first slender lead from branch manager Balaji’s impression that the robbers appeared to be from Bihar. “The manager had earlier worked in north India and he strongly felt that they were from that State,” the officer said. Ruling out any ‘terror angle’ to the heist, he said guns were freely available for as less as “`10,000 on the pavements of Bihar” and that the robbers must have procured the weapons from there. On Tuesday, 25 special police teams began an intensive enumeration drive of north Indians at several places. “The drive is aimed at finding whether any workers are missing and have not returned to their homes since Monday,” the officer said.In Canalpuram, Thurai pakkam, where there were 4,000 labourers from Bihar, police were conducting door-to-door enumeration. Search operations were also on at Kelambakkam, Madipakkam, Pallikaranai and Kanchipuram.In Semmenchery and Kannagi Nagar, house owners of the Slum Clearance Board flats had been told to alert the cops if any of their north Indian tenants had gone missing. The bank staff had also been told to take a re-look at the photographs of account-holders in their records. Meanwhile, it was revealed that the actual amount stolen was `19.5 lakh. The robbers left behind `1,089, so that the safe was not wiped out, sources said.
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