Three arrested in India after police crack $800,000 bank heist

Three people have been arrested in India after a daring 70m rupees ($800,000; £600,000) heist in which armed men posing as central bank officials robbed an ATM cash van.

On Saturday police in the southern city of Bengaluru said they had cracked the case and recovered 57.6m rupees of the money stolen three days earlier.

“Our investigation is on track to get the remaining amount,” Bengaluru police commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh told reporters.

Singh later told the BBC three suspects 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 so as to become predictable,” he added.