KUALA LUMPUR: A man dubbed as the "slickest thief of all time in Malaysia" who made headlines after stealing RM600,000 from a bank in 2017 by using nothing but a piece of paper was jailed for five years and fined RM8,000 today.
The sentence was handed down to R.Kartik, 31, after he was found guilty of stealing and trespassing by the magistrate's court at the end of the defence case.
In sentencing the accused, magistrate Nurfarahain Roslan said the defence had failed to raise a reasonable doubt in the prosecution's case against him.
She ordered the accused's jail term to run from today and for him to serve another six months' jail if he fails to pay the fine.
Kartik who is a lorry driver was charged with breaking into the cash room of HSBC Bank Malaysia Bhd and stealing RM600,000 cash belonging to the bank.
He committed the offence at the bank which was located on the first floor of Annexe, Menara Milenium building in Jalan Damanlela, Pusat Bandar Damansara Heights, Brickfields, here between 1pm and 2.05pm on Sept 8, 2017.
In urging for a maximum penalty to be imposed on the accused, deputy public prosecutor Najihah Farhana Che Awang said the case involved a huge amount of money which had caused the HSBC bank to suffer losses.
"The case was also extensively reported in the newspapers in 2017 and received widespread attention," she added while showing a newspaper cutting of the case to the court.
Meanwhile, Kartik through his counsel K.Ponnusamy pleaded for leniency saying that this was his first offence.
A total of 13 prosecution witnesses and four defence witnesses testified during the trial which began in September 2018.
It was reported that in 2017, a man had sauntered into a bank posing as a fire extinguisher technician and walked out with RM600,000 cash in 20 minutes.
The man had took the opportunity to sneak into the safe room without raising suspicion while the bank manager was taking his lunch break.
He was dubbed as "the slickest thief of all time in Malaysia" by the media as he managed to pull off a heist simply by showing a piece of paper purportedly to show that he had been appointed to inspect the fire extinguishers in the bank.