Bags with torn notes found by pond

TT, Kolkata, Nov. 13:Two large plastic bags full of currency notes of the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations snipped into pieces were found beside a pond-turned-garbage dump on Golf Club Road on Sunday morning.

Local youths, who were the first to get information about the "two bags filled with cash" from a ragpicker at 7.45am, rushed to the garbage dump only to find that the notes had all been torn.

A team from Jadavpur police station which was patrolling the area seized both bags.

The torn pieces of currency notes of the Rs 500 &
Rs 1,000 denominations found on Golf Club Road

The government had last week demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes as part of a crack down on black money and fake notes.

The police are yet to ascertain whether the shredded notes in the bags were genuine or not. "We will send the samples to the Reserve Bank of India for tests," an officer of Jadavpur police station said.

"Each note has four to five pieces, some even more. This makes it very difficult to determine how many notes were in the bags," the officer said. "Residents, including children, from some of the slums in the area had taken home several torn notes."

The police said they would collect the footage captured by the closed-circuit television cameras installed at the intersection of Deshapran Shashmal Road and Golf Club Road and the gates of a club.

"If the suspects had come in a car, at least one of the cameras must have captured its registration number," an officer said. "Once the number is known, we will be able to trace the owner of the car."

Even if the suspects had come on foot, the officer added, the footage would help the cops identify them.

According to local residents, the ragpicker who had first spotted the bags sifts through the bushes leading to the pond every morning. "Everyone calls him Pagla, we don't know his real name," said Raju Chowdhury, a resident of the area who works in a private firm.

Pagla, in his 30s, had on Sunday morning suddenly come running to a group of boys from a slum chatting on Golf Club Road and said there were sacks full of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes lying by the pond.

The group rushed to spot and word started spreading about the bags.

"Our enthusiasm ebbed when we saw the notes were torn. But still we turned the bags upside down to check if some notes were intact. But all of them had been cut, probably with scissors," said Sheikh Alam who lives in a slum nearby and was among the first to reach the spot.