3 arrested after police crack Ksh103.4M bank heist
Three people have been arrested in India after a daring Ksh103.4 million heist in which armed men posing as central bank officials robbed an ATM cash van.
On Saturday, November 22, 2025, police in the southern city of Bengaluru said they had cracked the case and recovered Ksh84.4 million of the money stolen three days earlier.
You might also like
“Our investigation is on track to get the remaining amount,” Bengaluru police commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh told reporters.
Singh later told the BBC that three persons of interest had been detained. “We are looking for two to three more,” he added.
Those people arrested include Gopal Prasad, an employee of cash transport company CMS, J Xavier, a former CMS worker, and Annappa Naik, a local police constable.
The robbery took place in broad daylight in the Lalbagh area of Bengaluru.
The thieves pretended to be officers of the Reserve Bank of India. They stopped the transport vehicle, saying they had to check the paperwork for such a large amount of money.
The vehicle’s cash custodian and two security guards were instructed to get into an SUV, while one of the gang members took control of the van, police said.
Police said the gang had changed vehicles, used fake registration plates and selected locations with minimal CCTV coverage to transfer the boxes of cash.
A massive hunt was launched on Wednesday, with more than 200 police officers deployed across Karnataka state and the neighbouring Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Goa states.
Detectives are investigating the role of CMS and possible violations of guidelines for transferring cash, Singh said.
“The vans should not follow the same route and timing repeatedly to become predictable,” he added.
The trio posed as officials from India’s central bank, robbing a vehicle.
Six men in an SUV stopped a cash transport van on a busy road as it was moving money between bank branches, Bengaluru police commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh told the BBC.
The van was carrying a driver, a cash custodian, and two armed security guards.
Singh said robbers told the people in the van that they were officials from the Reserve Bank of India and needed to verify if they had the correct documents to transport such a huge amount of money.
The gang told the cash custodian and guards to leave their weapons in the van and get into the SUV, while the driver was instructed to continue driving with the cash, police said.
The SUV followed the cash van for a few kilometres before the gang forced the driver out of the van, made the cash custodian and guards get out of the SUV, transferred the cash at gunpoint, and fled.
The area had little CCTV coverage, and police are investigating whether the gang used multiple vehicles in the operation.
The cash transportation service company had filed a police complaint.
