Burglars drill into Dubai shop from their apartment

Dubai: It's a nondescript place in the middle of Bur Dubai's bustling Meena Bazaar. The apartment where the three ‘surgeon burglars' lived for two months is located on the first floor of a huge corner building opposite a well-known supermarket.

The Bangladeshis kept to themselves. Now, we know why. It was from inside one of the apartment's modest rooms that they meticulously plotted and carried out one of the most daring - yet unsuccessful - burglaries in Dubai on August 27.

Patient plotting

"Who knew what was on their mind?" said a neighbour, referring to their audacious break-in attempt - a neat hole drilled in the concrete floor separating their room from the jewellery shop below.

The surgeon burglars, as the police would call them later, had it all worked out: land on the shop's office on the mezzanine floor, break open its glass door and go down the stairs to the showroom where the safe was kept. The shop had its shutters down and its cameras had also been switched off. But just when they broke open the glass door, an alarm went off, forcing them to make a quick exit.

In the haste, they left behind the sophisticated drilling equipment, which helped the police trace to a shop in a neighbouring emirate, where one of the suspects left his details.

Yet more shocking than the intended burglary was the manner in which the men had carried out the act, staying on the same premises for two months. After presumably conducting a study of the area, they had rented a room right above the jewellery shop - at Dh2,000 a month.

They gave nothing away and the bustling market went about its grind. Tenants in other flats moved in and out with no inkling of what was brewing.

"We knew nothing till we heard of the police coming here," said Samuel, who runs a toy store in the building.

The original tenant who stays in another flat on the same floor and had sublet the apartment to the men said people regularly visited them.

"There was nothing amiss," he said, adding, however, that at 11pm on August 27 the Bangladeshis had locked the apartment door from inside and had taken unusually long to open. When asked what took them so long, they had said they were resting as it was a Friday.

Safety net

"Nobody can beat the system here," said Viral B. Thaleshwar, the owner of the jewellery showroom, grateful to the authorities for averting a major theft.

"It is essential to keep up with the safety requirements stipulated by them so that it is easier to deal with situations like these," he said.

Pointing to a patch of white veneer board used to cover the hole, he said he had no way of knowing somebody had been drilling the ceiling.