Police on Thursday arrested a member of an ATM robbery gang that is suspected to be operating across the country.

Dharamvir Sharma alias Mahesh alias Panditji — who hails from Mathura district in Uttar Pradesh — was picked up from a hideout at Baharal by Ratua police. He spilled beans on a series of ATMs robberies in different parts of India.

His arrest followed a thorough investigation by the Malda police, including the district police chief, Alok Rajoria, and Dipak Sarkar, ASP (rural), who took days to collect information to locate Sharma. During the probe, the duo, with some other officials, had also checked CCTV footage of different locations which in total, were 150 hours long.

Police sources said on August 19 this year, the ATM of a nationalised bank in Sujapur under Kaliachak police station had been robbed and around Rs 10 lakh taken away. The loot was carried out barely 24 hours after a similar attempt was made at an ATM in Barasat, North 24 Parganas.

Also, during the lockdown, two more ATMs were broken in areas under Englishbazar and Gajole police stations — also in Malda district — and cash was looted.

The series of robberies prompted the police to form a special investigation team under Sarkar. Rajoria, the SP, also joined the probe.

“While examining CCTV footage of Kaliachak and Barasat exhaustively, we noticed the similarity in the culprit’s shoes. Soon, we found that the gloves worn by the culprits are similar,” said the SP.

This made the police here communicate with different police stations across the country to gather information about similar crimes and soon, they came across the CCTV footage of an ATM robbery in Madhya Pradesh.

The team continued its investigation and started checking registers in nearby hotels After days of work, the police could finally identify Sharma. They had alerted their sources across the district and soon, the team got a tip-off that Sharma was back in Malda and has taken shelter at a village in Ratua.

This made the police team, with Rajoria himself leading in mufti, to conduct a raid in Baharal on Thursday night.

“We could nab him. During preliminary interrogation, he has revealed that he and his associates were involved in ATM robberies in a number of states. We need to grill him further to get more information,” said a police officer.