Undertrial Turkish cyber criminal flees from police custody in Tripura

AGARTALA: An undertrial Turkish national, who has been accused of stealing huge amounts of cash by hacking ATMs in Kolkata, Guwahati and Agartala in 2019, fled from police custody here on Friday, the police said.

According to the police, four cybercriminals -- Hakan Zamburakan and Fettah Aldemir, both Turkish nationals, and Mohammad Hannan and Mohammad Rafiqul Islam, both Bangladeshi nationals -- were arrested in January last year for stealing cash amounting to lakhs of rupees by hacking ATMs in Kolkata, Guwahati and Agartala.

The four accused were lodged in the Tripura Central Jail since January last year.

A police officer said that Hakan Zamburakan was taken to the government-run Govind Ballabh Pant Medical College and Hospital in Agartala on Friday as he was feeling unwell. However, he escaped through the toilet of the hospital after deceiving the jail police constables. The Central Jail superintendent has sent an urgent message to all the police stations across Tripura to nab the 54-year-old foreign undertrial. The police are also probing as to how the Turkish national fled from the jail police custody. A Tripura police team with the help of the Barrackpore Police Commissionerate in West Bengal had arrested the four foreign cyber criminals from a hideout on the outskirts of Kolkata in January last year.

According to the police, the Turkish nationals, with the help of the Bangladeshi collaborators, had taken out lakhs of rupees from ATMs using ATM-cloning devices in Guwahati, Kolkata and Agartala in 2019. According to the police, over 80 clients of different banks in Tripura, mostly of the State Bank of India (SBI), had in November 2019 lost lakhs of rupees due to the fraudulent acts of the cyber criminals. According to a cyber-technology expert, the ATM-card cloning system comprises a spy camera, a memory card and a small data device to gather account details of bank customers. (IANS)

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