Robbers broke into a ground-floor shop in a three-storey building on Lenin Sarani by drilling a hole in the ceiling after getting into a first-floor abandoned room through a window AC opening, police said.

The owner has reported Rs 50,000 missing from the cash box in his complaint with Bowbazar police station.

The room on the first floor was used in the past by a nationalised bank, the police said.

Two more shops in the same row were found with drilled ceilings but the owners haven’t reported anything missing. There have been no arrests till late on Thursday, the police said.

The shop in the building at 157B Lenin Sarani that reported the theft sells aluminum products. It was operational on Wednesday night.

On Thursday morning when the owner opened the shutter, he found a gaping hole in the ceiling and the sale proceeds missing from the cash box.

One of the two other shops in the building with drilled ceilings is a photography studio. The other sells rubber products, the police said. All three shops share a common ceiling.

The police said cops had found evidence suggesting the robbers had accessed the first floor of the building by scaling the building’s rear wall and squeezing in through the window AC opening.

But the fact that nothing was stolen from the other two shops has made cops suspect that the drilled ceiling in the other two shops was meant to divert the police’s attention.

The police said cops were going through footage of CCTV cameras installed along Lenin Sarani.

An officer of Bowbazar police station said the upper floors of the building were abandoned and no one accessed them.

“This is an unusual theft where a shop on the main road has been targeted,” the officer said.

A few years ago, a departmental store on SN Banerjee Road had been robbed by a man who had used an abandoned staircase in the building to reach the first floor and enter the store through a secret backdoor that was accessible only to employees.

Investigations are on to find out if anyone with knowledge of the shop’s sale proceeds leaked the information to someone, which led to the robbery, the police said.