The rats of Bihar are upping their game. Not long ago, they allegedly drank thousands of litres of India made foreign liquor seized and kept in various police stations of the dry state. Now, a rodent has stolen diamond earrings from a jewellery shop in the state capital.

The heist came to light when a pair of diamond tops (earrings) went missing at Navratan Jewellers and Brothers on Boring Road in Patna.

“We opened our shop on the Mahashivratri Day (March 4) and noticed that the jewellery was missing from one of our counters. At first we suspected the hand of one of our employees and asked everybody, but they denied,” shop owner Dhiraj Kumar said.

Since the shop has CCTV cameras installed for security purposes, Dhiraj decided to examine the footage to nail the culprit. It was then that the penny dropped.

“At around 10:56pm a rat came on the counter where diamond tops were kept in a yellow envelope, picked it up in his mouth and ran away. It went inside the false ceiling of our shop. We couldn’t believe it and kept reviewing the footage again and again. But then that’s the truth,” Dhiraj said.

The shop staff searched every nook and corner, the false ceiling and even AC ducts, but the jewellery wasn’t found.

Dhiraj is now consoling himself by attributing the loss to divine intervention.

“The loss isn’t much as the cost of the tops was around Rs 23,000, but the incident is strange and happened around Mahashivratri. Rat is considered the vehicle of Lord Ganesha, and I now believe that the ornaments were recalled by him as a gift to his mother Goddess Parvati on her wedding anniversary,” Dhiraj added.

Meanwhile, scores of people have started turning up at the shop to see the theft by the rat. No police complaint has been lodged.

Earlier, when rats were blamed for drinking up the seized liquor kept in police stations, it snowballed into a major scandal and the needle of suspicion pointed towards the policemen.

Though it was never proved who actually gulped thousands of litres of

alcohol kept at the police stations, chief minister Nitish Kumar had ordered that seized liquor kept at police stations and government depots as exhibits be destroyed as soon as possible after obtaining court permission.