Burqa-clad woman’s shoplifting act in Hindu-owned garment shop caught on CCTV: Mangaluru

A video of a burqa-clad woman shoplifting clothes from a retail store in Mangaluru, Karnataka has gone viral on social media.

The incident took place at Sandhya Textiles store in Kavoor area of the coastal town on September 26. The unidentified woman, who had visited the store in the guise of shopping, manages to steal clothes while diverting the saleswoman’s attention and hid the same under her burqa, reports Udayavani.

This act was caught on the CCTV camera installed in the shop. The shopowner has filed a case in this regard at Kavoor police station.

Such acts by burqa-clad thieves are quite common, and they seem to exclusively target non-Muslim stores. Here are some more cases –

April 2022 – Burqa clad women caught on CCTV stealing expensive lehengas (womens dress) worth Rs 85K from a reputed shop of Muzaffarnagar, UP owned by Sanjay Batla under pretext of Eid shopping. A similar burqa gang was arrested and expensive jewelry recovered just recently, police had said at the time.

Sept 2021 – Three women clad in burqa –  Bibijaan, Hussainabi and Jaithumbi – arrived in a Jos Alukkas jewellery shop in Puttur, Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka and stole gold worth Rs. 2.6L.

Dec 12, 2020 – Three women wearing a burkha robbed a jewellery store at the Kunte Chowk in Sadashiv Peth, Pune. Over the past month, Pune Police said they had arrested nine people, including seven women, from three different groups for committing thefts at various shops while wearing burkhas and stolen valuables were recovered from them. The accused were from Aurangabad, Malegaon and Pune, and operating separately but had a similar modus operandi of wearing a burkha to steal valuables from different shops, police said.

Dec 14, 2020 – Burqa-clad women used children to steal jewelry worth Rs. 12 lakhs out of Shringar jewelers in Bareli town, Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh. Previously, a similar robbery of jewelry worth Rs. 2 lakhs was carried out by 4 burqa-clad women in Alankar jewelers of the same town.

Oct 2020 –  A gang of four burkha-clad women from Malegaon were arrested for stealing gold jewelry from shops in Mumbai. Sajada alias Bashir Ansari (30), Nazia Shaikh (50), Nasreen Shaikh (50) and Yasmin Khan (35) had committed similar crimes in Kurla, Bhandup, Mumbra, Nashik and Hyderabad, the police said.

Sept 2017 – Three burqa-clad women stole gold jewellery worth lakhs from Chakabhai Jewellers in Vadodara, Gujarat.

Aug 2019 – Two burqa-clad women attempted to steal tubs of baby formula and other supermarket items in UK.

France – An undated video shows burqa-clad women being caught shoplifting a staggering amount of chocolates they had managed to hide under their black robes.

Hijab and niqab clad woman too have tried to use the anonymity granted by Islamic religiously-mandated dresses, ostensibly to not ‘tempt’ men, to carry out robberies.