Container with Dell Notebooks worth ₹35 crore missing from yard; police trace it to Tiruvallur, arrest six men 

Chennai Police recover stolen Dell Notebooks worth ₹35 crore, arrest six suspects in a well-coordinated operation.

The Greater Chennai City Police have cracked a case of a missing container — packed with Dell Notebooks worth nearly ₹35 crore — that was shipped from Shanghai and had gone missing from a yard in Chennai Port. The police tracked the stolen container to a secluded place near Tiruvallur when the suspects were attempting to transfer the contents in the container to two other vehicles bound to Bengaluru and other places. 

A ship by name ‘Seapan Osaka’ carried a 40-foot-long container stacked with 5,230 Dell Notebooks worth ₹35 crore from Shanghai, China and docked at Chennai Port on September 7 afternoon.

The container was offloaded from the ship on the same day and shifted to a yard handled by a private firm. On September 11, the freight forwarding company sent its trailer-truck to transport the container from the yard to be delivered to the consignee.

When the driver of the trailer reached the yard, he found the container missing. The yard supervisor also confirmed that the container was missing before reporting it to the operation manager of the yard, P.Pon Isakkiyappan.

The staff of the yard and freight forwarding agency analysed the Container Tracking Report of the Port and found that a trailer belonging to G.M.Transport had picked up the container from the yard on September 10 itself. The Port entry permit records showed the owner of the truck as Manikandan and driver as Paulraj.

One of the staff at the yard who was on documentation duty, had prepared the documents and fraudulently issued an out-pass for the trailer, enabling Paulraj to drive it out of the yard. 

The Harbour police registered a case based on a complaint from Mr. Isakkiyappan, and launched a probe to trace the trailer that had carried the container away.