KOLKATA: Four armed robbers snatched away cellphones of everyone present inside the office of a Park Street firm offering gold loans, tampered with the CCTV cameras and even took away the hard disks on their way out after looting gold worth close to Rs 3 crore in an half-an-hour operation on Thursday afternoon.With the office of IIFL located at 82 Park Street, barely 100 m from the Park Circus Seven-Point connector, the criminals, though, forgot to count the numerous other CCTV cameras that are lined up on both sides of this extremely busy road. These cameras are now providing the investigators important clues as they try and solve one of the biggest crimes ever committed in such a public manner in this city.A joint team of detective department and the Beniapukur police say they now have leads from the various CCTV cameras located nearby -one located at Park Sweets, right next to the crime spot, and another at the Tiger Inn hotel -providing vital clues. The cops have created a couple of sketches and the employees and customers present during the robbery have been told to cooperate. The possibility of an insider is becoming stronger, said sources."It was a precisely calculated crime on several counts. One, the gang had removed every bit of evidence they could from the crime scene -CCTVs, hard disks and even cellphones. Two, they knew a huge amount of gold was to be stored at the office on that day.A couple of sources have told us there was a higher quantity of gold at the office though IIFL authorities are yet to confirm it. Three, the criminals were confident about each location of the entire area -they knew the precise position of CCTVs. Such was their confidence that they spoke freely with each other in Hindi and smoked cigarettes. The butts of these cigarettes are being preserved for forensic evidence," said one of the investigators.Not one of the locals -not even the lone security guard -heard any sound. "I was not even aware there was such an office here. The place where this office is now located was actually let out to a beauty parlour earlier. There is a gym here and it's frequented by several patrons from 6 am onwards. There is an ICICI bank branch on the ground floor, a boutique and a travel agency, all located here along with residents. I cannot believe someone can house a loan office that deals in gold without proper security," said Wasim Goldar , a local resident who runs a CCTV business.The cops say all the accused are between 25 and 35 years.They feel it is clear a precise recce was carried out. "We have collected all call dumps between 2.30 pm and 4 pm from the area besides the CCTV footages . Besides questioning the employees and victims, we have asked IIFL to give us a list of all their employees who have worked here in the past 18 months. A list of all local criminals have been made and those who have joined the gym recently have also been identified," said a source.The police maintained there were two other things that had caught their attention -one, there was a lot of furnishing work going on at the house and a large number of floating workers were being employed. None of them carried any verification. Two, the IIFL office saw a renovation of the CCTV cameras merely a couple of weeks ago. " All the important links are being studied," said a source. "We have collected old database from CID and Barrackpore commissionarate and trying to work on leads," added an officer.

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