Container with Dell Notebooks worth ₹35 crore missing from yard; police trace it to Tiruvallur, arrest six men 

The Greater Chennai City Police have cracked a case of a missing container — packed with Dell Notebooks worth nearly ₹35 crore — that was shipped from Shanghai and had gone missing from a yard in Chennai Port. The police tracked the stolen container to a secluded place near Tiruvallur when the suspects were attempting to transfer the contents in the container to two other vehicles bound to Bengaluru and other places. 

A ship by name ‘Seapan Osaka’ carried a 40-foot-long container stacked with 5,230 Dell Notebooks worth ₹35 crore from Shanghai, China and docked at Chennai Port on September 7 afternoon.

The container was offloaded from the ship on the same day and shifted to a yard handled by a private firm. On September 11, the freight forwarding company sent its trailer-truck to transport the container from the yard to be delivered to the consignee.

When the driver of the trailer reached the yard, he found the container missing. The yard supervisor also confirmed that the container was missing before reporting it to the operation manager of the yard, P.Pon Isakkiyappan.

The staff of the yard and freight forwarding agency analysed the Container Tracking Report of the Port and found that a trailer belonging to G.M.Transport had picked up the container from the yard on September 10 itself. The Port entry permit records showed the owner of the truck as Manikandan and driver as Paulraj.

One of the staff at the yard who was on documentation duty, had prepared the documents and fraudulently issued an out-pass for the trailer, enabling Paulraj to drive it out of the yard. 

The Harbour police registered a case based on a complaint from Mr. Isakkiyappan, and launched a probe to trace the trailer that had carried the container away. 

Assistant Commissioner of Police, Harbour P.Rajasekar said, “Our investigation revealed that one Ilavarasan, who was in the shift on September 9 had prepared the documents to take the container out of the yard and used credentials of a deputy manager including his password. Since the GPRS in some of the Notebooks was active, we quickly traced the stolen goods to Manavalan Nagar near Tiruvallur. Our team surrounded the suspects who had transferred the goods from the container to two mini-trucks to be transported to Bengaluru and other places.” 

The suspects had planned to offload the container in a secluded place and not use the same trailer since it might be traced while crossing the toll plazas. They had shifted the stolen goods to two 20-foot-long containers and two trucks. The trailer with the empty container was taken to Agrakarapatti, near Nilakottai.   

Police arrested six persons, including the driver, S. Balraj, 31, of Old Napalayam, owner G. Manikandan, 31, of Kondakarai, Tiruvallur district, and T.Muthuraj, 46, of Agrakarapatti, Nilakottai, K. Rajesh, 39, N. Napoleon, 46, A. Sivabalan, 44, of Tiruvottriyur. The police recovered as many as 5,207 Notebooks from the suspects. 

The main suspect, Ilavarasan, had taken 23 Notebooks with him for showing as samples to prospective buyers and he would be nabbed soon, the police said. Search is on for another associate too.

Published - September 20, 2024 10:34 pm IST