Serial chain snatcher says love for wife prompted return to crime

Hyderabad: Love for his wife is what apparently prompted notorious chain snatcher Umesh Kathik return to the field of crime, which he had chose to quit due to ill health. According to the Petbasheerabad police, who brought Kathik, 28, to the city from Ahmedabad where he was arrested, said he had over 100 cases registered […]

Hyderabad: Love for his wife is what apparently prompted notorious chain snatcher Umesh Kathik return to the field of crime, which he had chose to quit due to ill health.

According to the Petbasheerabad police, who brought Kathik, 28, to the city from Ahmedabad where he was arrested, said he had over 100 cases registered against him, with the police in several States looking for him.

Kathik, who was recently nabbed by the Ahmedabad police, had reportedly decided to pull the curtains on his life as a criminal due to ill health, had returned to the field after getting married last year. His aim, he told the police, was to make money to buy gifts for his wife and fulfill her wishes.

It is learnt that during questioning, Kathik, who is good at driving bikes, confessed that several years ago, he met a chain snatcher who came to his father’s tea stall and learnt techniques from him. Though they committed offences together in the beginning, Kathik later tread his own path, and was involved in over 100 cases in Hyderabad, Cyberabad, Rachakonda, Karnataka, Gujarat and Rajasthan.

When the investigators asked him about the stolen material, he is learned to have told them he had lost some of it here in the city while the rest was taken to Ahmedabad, following which a police team left for Ahmedabad to retrieve the stolen material.

In January, Kathik had landed in the city by flight and fled with about 13.5 tolas of gold that he snatched from six women in six different places across the city. He had first stolen a bike from Asifnagar and used the same one to snatch chains from women in Marredpally, Petbasheerabad, Tukaram Gate and Medipally. He then boarded a train to Ahmedabad.