Mysuru :
An antique Quran dating back to the Mughal era has been seized by the police from a 10-member gang at K R Nagar town in the district. The gang claimed to have got the book from Hyderabad and was planning to sell it for Rs 5 crore, the police said.
The district police came to know about the gang a week ago when they came across a video which had details of the book. The video was made to find potential buyers. After showing the book to historian and former vice-chancellor of Goa Univeristy and Mangalore University, Prof Sheikh Ali, who confirmed its authenticity, the police followed up the case. On Monday night, the police received a tip-off about the gang’s whereabouts in K R Nagar town.
The police officers approached four members of the gang on the pretext of buying the book and arrested them. The remaining six members were arrested in Mysuru city.
The arrested are Nagaraju S (39) and A Muralikrishna (30) of Raichur district, Kanakappa (40) of Gadag district, Kallappa (40) of Kalburgi, Sanath (27), Ravindra (33) and Raghu (30) of Udupi district, Vijayendra (30) and Prasad (43) of Shivamogga district and Bhaskar (31) of Bengaluru rural district. Kallappa is an SDA in the Food and Civil Supplies Department. Prof Ali said going by the date mentioned on the last page of the 604-page book based on lunar calendar, the book belongs to the 17th century and is 398 years old. The pages are gold-coated and the calligraphy is in Arabic.
The pages have decorative borders, he added. He said the ink used in the book is not an ordinary one but a chemically treated one and hence the writings are still intact.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Karnataka / by ENS / August 12th, 2015