Jharkhand: 2 stolen Buddha statues recovered, Five arrested
DAYS AFTER two stone statues of the Buddha had been stolen from a lately excavated monastery – believed to be a minimum of 900 years previous – in Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh district, police have arrested 5 individuals from Ranchi for the robbery and recovered the statues.
The police stated all 5 accused carried out a recce on the excavation website online in Bahoranpur village in Hazaribagh on March 3, zeroing in at the two statues. On March 21, the statues went lacking, in step with ASI Patna’s Superintending Archaeologist Rajendra Dehuri’s grievance. At the foundation of the grievance, an FIR was once registered.
Hazaribagh SP Karthik S stated: “We scanned CCTV photos, fastened technical surveillance and wondered one Kumar Sujit of Ranchi. It led us to the opposite accused and the restoration of the stolen statues.” There arrests had been made on Thursday.
The police stated any other accused, Sanjay Aggarwal, who claims to be Ayurvedic drugs supplier, and Kumar Sujit got here to grasp of the statues from newspapers and “hatched a plan to promote the ones in black marketplace at top costs”.
The police stated after accomplishing the recce, the accused assembled at the intervening evening of March 20 and 21 on the website online. “They took away two 1.5-foot Buddha statues and fled on motorbikes to Hazaribagh bus stand from the place they took a bus to Ranchi. That they had deliberate to promote the statues after the search cooled down,” a police supply stated.
The ASI had found out the monastery at Burhani village in February, excavating 10 stone statues of the Buddha and Tara. It additionally discovered a conveyable symbol which gave the impression to be that of Shaivite deity Maheswari – indicating cultural assimilation within the space. ASI officers had stated the monastery was once a “large in finding” — it’s at the previous path to Varanasi, 10 km from Sarnath, the place the Buddha gave his first sermon. They stated the presence of Tara’s statues confirmed the conceivable proliferation of the Vajrayana type of Buddhism in Jharkhand.
