No headway in finding Nobel citation so far
The accused told police they threw items that were of no use to them in bushes and drains in Kalkaji.
New Delhi: Despite reconstructing the route taken by the alleged burglars who decamped with Kailash Satyarthi’s Nobel medal replica and the citation from his home, police has failed to find the stolen citation.
Three persons were arrested on February 12 in connection with the theft of Nobel medal replica and other valuables from the child rights activist’s Kalkaji residence.
While other stolen items, including the medal replica, have been recovered, the citation has not been found yet.
The accused told police that they had thrown the items that were of no use to them in some bushes and drains near the DDA flats in Kalkaji. The routes that the burglars could have used for commuting have also been studied but there hasn’t been any breakthrough. The police visited the area and they found a shawl that belonged to Satyarthi but the citation wasn’t found.
The investigating officers reconstructed the entire route taken by the accused but to no avail. “We are speaking to morning walkers by showing them pictures of the citation. We even questioned ragpickers in the area but we haven’t had any success. The citation is waterproof and we are searching it in drains around the route taken by them,” said a senior police officer. The accused, however, told cops they didn’t take away anything that resembles the citation. “We suspect that they don’t remember what they have done with it. We have shown them pictures but they haven’t been able to recall till now,” he said.
The police is suspecting that after the accused decamped with items from three houses they burgled into, including Mr Satyarthi’s, they separated the loot that could be sold and the ones that were of “no use” to them.
Chances are that they might have kept the citation somewhere and aren’t able to recall it, he added. Mr Satyarthi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. He shared the prize with Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai.
Mr Satyarthi had presented his Nobel Peace Prize medal to President Pranab Mukherjee in January, 2015. The original medal has been preserved and is now on display at the Rashtrapati Bhavan Museum.