Bengal police arrests four foreigners in Tripura ATM heist

West Bengal police arrested two Turkish and two Bangladeshi nationals on Tuesday for allegedly withdrawing lakhs of rupees from State Bank of India ATMs in Tripura using cloning devices, officials said. Acting on inputs received from their counterparts in Tripura, West Bengal police arrested them from Belgharia in North 24 Parganas district in the wee hours of Tuesday.

"We had specific inputs from Tripura police that four foreign nationals were trying to flee through West Bengal. We activated our sources and managed to apprehend these four," a senior police officer of West Bengal police, who did not want his name to be made public, told PTI. The Turkish nationals have been identified as Hakan Zanburkan and Fettah Aldemir, while the other two are Mohammad Hannan and Mohammad Rafiqul Islam of Bangladesh, the IPS officer said.

The two Turkish suspects had withdrawn an unspecified amount of money that ran into several lakhs of rupees from the ATMs by using cloning devices with the help of their Bangladeshi accomplices. They were suspected to have installed skimming devices in automated teller machines to clone debit cards and had stolen the money.

The bank had received 45 complaints from customers that their money was taken out from various ATMs in Agartala, State Bank of India Regional Manager Dibyendu Chowdhury had said on Monday. A team of Tripura police is on its way here to take them back on transit remand, the Kolkata police official said.

The case is being probed by the cyber cell of Tripura police..