An employee of a jewellery workshop in Muchipara who allegedly stole gold from his workplace and put his mobile phone in a bucket of water to wipe his electronic trail was arrested from outside a cinema in Nadia where he went to watch Pushpa 2 with a friend.

Police said Dilip Modak, a goldsmith the Muchipara store had hired to make jewellery, fled with the gold from the workshop after Durga Puja.

His colleagues found his phone dipped in water inside a bucket hours after he had fled from the central Calcutta workshop on October 23.

A complaint was lodged with Muchipara police station.

Based on electronic surveillance and Modak’s conversations with his friends, cops came to know about his new phone numbers and learned that he would go to watch Pushpa 2 at Sangeeta Talkies in Nadia’s Krishnagar on Saturday afternoon.

“We received information about his presence in Krishnagar. Very little time was left if we wanted to catch him in the cinema,” said an officer in the detective department of Kolkata Police.

The city police got confirmation from the Krishnagar police and local informers that Modak was in the cinema where the film was being screened.

"But the team could not locate him in the 'houseful' show and was about to return empty-handed when another confirmation came about Modak’s presence in the hall," another officer at Muchipara police station said.

“By tracking the tower location of all his phone numbers we came to know that a phone with one of his SIMs was in Sangeeta Talkies. We were very confident that he was still inside. So we waited for the show to end,” said the officer.

Modak stepped out of the hall with a female friend after the show ended when he was arrested.

The police said 441g of gold and around Rs 45,000 were seized from him.

“It was surprising that he was carrying a portion of the stolen gold in his pocket,” the officer said. "He had put his phone in a bucket of water after the theft to wipe off his electronic trail."

Investigators said that after stealing the gold, Modak fled to Burdwan and Islampur in North Dinajpur and finally to Assam.