• Four bike-borne men chase car for 8 kms on Expressway last night.
• Midnight robbery attempt fails as the daring driver rams the car against highway robbers’ bike; incident  near Tubinakere.
• Southern Range DIGP to form special teams; regular, intensified patrolling to be conducted after 7 pm. 

Mysore/Mysuru: An attempted robbery on Mysuru-Bengaluru Expressway, last night has been reported. It is learnt the incident took place last midnight at a place after Tubinakere in the premises of Mandya Industrial Area, before the Gananguru Toll Plaza while the car was coming from Bengaluru.

However, the attempted robbery was foiled by an alert driver of the car Srikanth who was heading towards Mysuru from Bengaluru.

According to Bapu Lingaraj Urs, one of the passengers in the car, they started from Bengaluru at 10.30 pm yesterday in their Hyundai Accent car and accompanying him was Girish and Srikanth. As they reached the Mandya Industrial Area in the surroundings of Tubinakere at around 12.15 am, a bullet bike with four men on it intercepted the car.

When the driver of the car spotted the bike-borne men, three of them sitting behind the rider of the bike, holding machetes and metal rods and covering their faces with towels, the car driver knew the danger and began to drive fast.

However, the robbers relentlessly pursued the car shouting at the occupants to stop the vehicle. The bike tried to overtake the car from the left but because of the traffic it could not overtake us.

However, the chase continued for over 8 kms and the frustrated criminals started to hit the front of the car with the rod.

At one point, the bike almost overtook the car. However, showing presence of mind, the driver of the car turned left, ramming against the speeding bike. The criminals lost their balance and had to stop their bike near an underpass. Moving a little ahead, the occupants of the car noticed another Hero Honda bike lay in wait for them.

“Seeing another bike trying to follow us, our driver accelerated. The other bike had two men and they could not match the speed of the car,” the car travellers said.

After covering a few kilometres, the travellers called up 112, the Emergency Response Support System (ERSS) and registered a complaint.

According to the travellers, they were commuting on the main carriageway of the Expressway and were not using the service road. “The service roads wore a deserted look from both the sides. Looking at the way we were chased, we don’t believe anyone would risk travelling on service roads as after the crime, the criminals can easily get away to any of the villages or towns along the service roads,” the travellers added.