Cash van driver who ran off with Rs 22.5 crore nabbed by cops
The driver of a cash van who disappeared transporting Rs 22.5 crore in hard cash for refilling AXIS Bank ATMs across south-east Delhi was arrested early on Friday.
Delhi Police recovered the cash from his possession. An amount of Rs 11,000 was said to be missing, sources said.
A hunt was launched after SIS, the private security agency hired by Axis Bank to transport cash, rang up police control room around 5.30pm on Thursday to inform that one of its drivers fled with a Mahindra pick-up van stashed with money on the way from Vikaspuri to Okhla.
The driver, Pradeep Shukla, is from Uttar Pradesh and had joined the agency recently.
According to police, driver Pradeep Shukla and gunman Vinay Patel, both employees with the Security and Intelligence Services (SIS), were tasked to deliver the cash at various ATMs of Axis Bank in Delhi.
“The incident happened on Thursday after the two left the Vikaspuri Axis Bank branch in west Delhi to ATMs in Okhla, which was their next destination to deliver the cash. Midway, the gunman asked the driver to stop as he wanted to attend to nature’s call,” a police officer said on Thursday night.
Axis Bank assured that the cash was “fully insured” and “neither the bank nor the customer would get affected”. It said the van didn’t belong to the bank and the driver was not its employee.
