BBC:
Nine 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 Monday, police in the southern city of Bengaluru said they had arrested two more people, in addition to seven earlier, and recovered 68.5m rupees of the money stolen last week.
“We cannot say how many more will be arrested as we are continuing to investigate the case,” Lokesh Jagalasar, Deputy Commissioner of police for Bengaluru South, told the BBC.
The thieves had 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.
Those arrested earlier include Gopal Prasad, an employee of cash transport company CMS, J Xavier, a former CMS worker, and Annappa Naik, a local police constable.
Detectives are investigating the role of CMS and possible violations of guidelines for transferring cash, Bengaluru police commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh had said earlier.
“The vans should not follow the same route and timing repeatedly so as to become predictable,” he added.
