Elderly couple robbed at knifepoint in Dum Dum, second attack in four days
Telegraph | 18 February 2025
Robbers cut through an iron grille on a window, entered a two-storey house in the Dum Dum Cantonment area in north Calcutta and robbed an elderly couple holding a knife against them.
The heist at 2am on Monday once again rang alarm bells about crime in the city and the vulnerability of its elderly residents.
The group held a knife on Putul Majumder, 69, as her septuagenarian husband, Sankar Majumder, who is immobile and bound to the bed for the past eight years.
Police said their preliminary investigation revealed that a group of seven entered the house on Nalta School Road through a window on the ground floor.
They cut open the iron grill covering the window and got in, a police officer said.
The Majumders have rented the ground floor to a couple who weren’t around on Sunday. The couple’s son Debashis and his wife live in Maharashtra. There was no one on the ground floor to notice the men enter, the police said.
After scanning the ground floor room for valuables the group took the stairs to reach the first floor, where the elderly couple live.
“When I woke up they said chitkaar korley mere debo (Will kill if you scream). I asked them how they entered. What harm have I done?” Putul told reporters. “They carried a flat knife and held it on my throat saying if I screamed they would kill me. I kept mum. They used the knife to slit open a mattress on the bed looking for valuables.”
The woman said she was asked to hand over her nose ring, gold bangles and a ring she was wearing even as she kept pleading with the men not to kill them.
In her statement to the police, Putul said the robbers asked for the keys to the almirahs on the first floor. While two of the gang members kept opening almirahs one after another, others stood guard at the entrance to the room and on the stairs.
The robbers ransacked the almirahs for valuables. They dumped the other items on the beds.
A senior officer of the Dum Dum police station said: “Footage from a CCTV camera on the ground floor shows the gang splitting into two groups — three men entered the house first and the rest a bit later. The last four wore helmets.”
“The footage shows the gang leaving the house at 4.56am, the officer said.
Police investigators said the gang knew the tenants on the ground floor were not home and that the elderly couple were living all themselves. “Someone known to the family may have provided the information,” one of the officers on the case said.
This is the second attack on an elderly person in the city within four days.
On February 13, a 68-year-old woman, bedridden for the past few weeks with a broken femur, was robbed of her valuables at her Central Avenue house by men who entered her three-storey building flashing a sharp weapon at the caretaker and then threatened to chop the woman to pieces.
No arrests have been made yet in connection with the case. The police have faced flak for the delay.
Barrackpore police commissioner Ajay Kumar Thakur said: “This incident involving the elderly couple in Dum Dum happened early on Monday. We have found certain leads and are working on them. I assure you we will get a breakthrough soon.”
Tapati Laha, a resident of Nalta School Road in Dum Dum Cantonment and a neighbour of the Majumders, said: “Such a daring robbery has never happened in our locality. If a knife is held to a woman and told to hand over her ornaments you can understand her plight. This is so scary.”