Railway cops return stolen cellphones

CHENNAI: After having nabbed a five-member gang from Jharkhand for stealing a large number of mobile phones from people at railway stations, the Government Railway Police (GRP) has now started the painstaking process of tracking down the owners to return the phones. Going the extra mile, the cops are downloading the numbers from the mobiles and searching the SMSes as well, to reach the owners. With the SIM cards in several instruments either deactivated or removed, this has been their only option.Since the recovery of the 75 mobile phones on February 3, the police have returned 20 cell phones to their rightful owners, of which a majority were from Chennai, three from Salem and one from Kerala.“We have sent the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers of the mobile phones to the State Crimes Record Bureau, besides alerting police stations across Tamil Nadu.They would be tracing any complaints registered on missing mobile phones that are matching with these IMEI numbers and in turn alert the owners,” R Sekar, Additional Director General of Police, GRP, told Express.According to police sources, the mobiles are being returned to the owners along with the SIM cards, in case they are still active. However, in a large number of the recovered mobiles, the SIM cards have either been removed or have been blocked by the owners themselves, leaving the police to download saved numbers from the memory cards.“Thereafter, we ring up some of the numbers at random to get in touch with the owners. In come cases it clicked and four owners were identified on a single day,” V Ponramu, Deputy Superintendent of Police, GRP, Central Railway Station said. “In some cases, SMSes have also come in handy in locating the owners,” he added.It may be recalled that a Railway Protection Force team seized 75 stolen mobile phones from the Jharkhand gang.