Mysuru:  Is an organised gang roaming around in city targeting women to part with their gold jewellery? A couple of incidents in and around Hootagalli prove this. The women are promised of good fortune, better health and are made to remove gold ornaments and place them inside small vessels that contain rice and a few threads. A puja ritual is held where the attention of women is diverted and the valuable stolen.

One such incident has been reported from Hootagalli where a woman was relieved of her mangalsutra worth Rs.1.50 lakh. Conmen successfully convinced the woman to remove her 50-gram mangalsutra and place it in a steel container containing rice. She was asked to open the container later. And when she did, she found the mangalsutra missing.

The woman is N. Annapoorna, wife of A.N. Ananthkumar and a resident of First Main, 5th Cross, Patel Nagegowda Layout in Hootagalli. She is in a state of shock and is unable to come to terms that she has lost her mangalsutra to criminals.

An FIR has been registered at Vijayanagar Police Station in this regard. According to complainant given by Annapoorna, on Mar.5 at around 12 noon, a man wearing saffron clothes, a coloured headgear with vibhuthi on his forehead approached her when her husband was away.

“He told me that he was from Bangarpet in Kolar and would pray for the well-being of my    family. I trusted him and he told me to remove my mangalsutra and place it in a small container that contained rice, stones and a few threads. He repeatedly told me to trust him,” the woman narrated.

“The mangalsutra had 40 grams, 6-gram thali and 4-gram golden beads. He placed the mangalsutra inside the container and sat inside the hall of my house to perform puja.

After the puja rituals, he covered the container with a cloth and tied it with threads. He asked me to open the container after 30 minutes. Later I found the mangalsutra missing,”      she said.

Annapoorna later alerted her neighbours who went in search of the man in vain. Later when her husband Ananthkumar returned with her children, she narrated the incident to him.

Ananthkumar told Star of Mysore that a day or two before the incident, one woman selling hairpins, threads and needles came to the locality and met some locality women and told them that a pujari from Bangarpet had magic in his hands and he could cure all ailments.

She even said that her father was completely cured by the pujari. To make her point more convincing, the woman told the locality woman that the pujari will come to their houses in one or two days and asked them to make best use of that. She also told them that the pujari will not visit one area twice.

As per the information given by the woman, the pujari came to the locality on Mar.5 and he went to the house of Lakshmakka of Hootagalli.

Fortunately, before he could begin his puja rituals, Lakshmakka’s husband returned to the house and he asked the pujari to leave the place. Next, he went to the house of Annapoorna and was successful in conning her.

Her husband told SOM that his wife believed the woman who gave information about the pujari and could relate when the pujari visited his house. “Mar.5 was our 23rd wedding anniversary and I had gifted a mangalsutra just a few days back. Unfortunately my wife lost the valuable as she fell for the conman’s words,” he said.

Cautioning women, Police have asked them to be careful when entertaining strangers when their husbands were away from the houses.

“These people come in the guise of spiritual gurus, mixer, fan and boiler repair men and they are experts in attention diversion,” the Police said. If women come across such people, they must inform the locality and the Police, they added.