A snatcher fled with the handbag of a woman walking back home with her sister after dinner at a Salt Lake restaurant on Monday night, police said.

Rhitama Basak, 24, and her sister had stepped out of their home in FE Block to have dinner at a restaurant close by. This was their first outing since the imposition of the lockdown, she said.

After leaving the restaurant opposite Central Park around 9.30pm, the sisters decided to go for a walk. “When we were close to a small park inside the Karunamoyee Housing Estate, a cyclist enquired the time. I told him the time before heading for home,” Basak said.

She said they were walking down a lane near the Bidhannagar Municipal School when she felt someone pulling her handbag. She struggled to hold on to the bag but the man managed to grab it and flee. The sisters gave chase and saw it was the same man who enquired the time, Basak said.

They called their parents and their father Basab Basak reached the spot, along with some neighbours.

He alerted police and a team reached the spot. “The bag had some money and a smartphone. We have filed a police complaint.”

Anuradha Paul, 36, another FE Block resident, said men often drank in the park in the darkness. “The lights here don’t function most of the time.”