Thief wears Bengaluru Police constable's uniform, flaunts it to wife on video call

This one is nothing short of a script from a comic book, where a thief in custody wears a police constable’s uniform he sees lying around, and it comes to light only a year later and gets the personnel into trouble. In a bizarre twist, an investigation of a theft in Bengaluru's Indiranagar got Constable HR Sonar suspended as the ghost of the past came haunting.

Saleem Sheikh, aka Bombay Saleem, a notorious thief, has been involved in multiple thefts. And in 2024, he was arrested by the Govindapura police for 50 such cases. As the officials were making attempts to recover the jewellery and valuables he had allegedly stolen, he was taken outside the city and put up in a lodge.Now, this is when Saleem pulled the stunt of wearing the cop’s uniform and quickly dialling his wife in a bid to impress her. All was well until a year later, in a completely different case involving Saleem, the police checked his phone as part of the investigation. It was during this probe that screenshots of the thief in a constable’s uniform came to light. This led to another enquiry in which it was learnt that when constables, who were supervising the thief, left him unattended. And that is probably when the swift to act Saleem took advantage of the situation.

B Devaraj, Deputy Commissioner of Police (East) confirmed that the screenshots were from a WhatsApp video call that Saleem had made to his wife.

“We questioned him later and found that Saleem was previously arrested by the Govindapura police last year in a similar theft case. To recover the valuables, the police had taken him outside Bengaluru and stayed in a hotel. Saleem used Sonar's uniform and called his wife. It amounts to negligence, and Sonar has been suspended,” Devaraj was quoted by news outlet NDTV.

The authorities are also probing the thief’s relationship with the constable and other personnel to see if there is any link that provides him with opportunities to commit such crimes.