Police said they were looking into the role of a “local agent” in the jewellery shop heist in Howrah’s Domjur on Tuesday afternoon.

This “local agent”, the police said, was familiar with the area and aided the gang members in executing the heist.

A little after noon on Tuesday, a group of four cleaned out the Howrah store. Some 5kg of gold in jewellery was robbed, said a shop assistant.

“There was specific information with the gang about the shop owner being away from the shop. Soon after he returned to the shop with a security guard in tow, two other members of the gang entered and completed the operation,” the police officer said.

The store on Howrah-Amta Road, around 20km from the heart of Calcutta, is a stone’s throw from the nearest police station. The robbers allegedly drove past the station after the heist.

Senior Howrah police officers said they were in touch with their counterparts in the Asansol-Durgapur police commissionerate to find out about Sonu Singh, a resident of Siwan in Bihar who was arrested on Monday night for his alleged involvement in a jewellery shop heist in Raniganj on Sunday.

A gang of seven to eight armed robbers raided the Raniganj shop on Sunday and got involved in a gunfight with police when they tried to intercept them. T

The robbers while escaping on three motorbikes hijacked a private car from Asansol and fled to Jharkhand.

The gang that entered the MS Gems and Jewellers Son on Howrah-Amta Road in Domjur left on two motorcycles after wrapping up the operation within 12 minutes.

“We are trying to collect information about the gang involved in the heist in Raniganj on Sunday,” said a senior officer of the Howrah police commissionerate.

“We want to know if some members of the same gang were involved in Tuesday’s robbery in Howrah,” he said.

A team of CID officers collected fingerprints from the store apart from speaking to the security guard and a woman at the counter. Police have started scanning the registration numbers of the two-wheelers that the robbers used to leave the shop.

A separate CID team reached Raniganj with forensic officials to collect the samples there.

“We are keeping a record of the fingerprints from both the shops in our database for future reference. The respective police commissionerates in Asansol and Howrah are conducting the probe,” a senior CID officer said. “We are trying to understand if both the heists were carried out by the same team.”