WB police recover Bula chowdhury's stolen Padma Shri, Medals within 48 hrs
The Padma Shri medal and its badge, six gold medals of SAF Games, Tenzing Norgay Award, several international awards and mementoes won by Bula Chowdhury during her swimming career were found missing from cabinet after her ancestral home in HindMotor in the Hooghly district was burgled in her absence on August 14/15.
The Criminal Investigation Department of West Bengal Police took the case on Saturday and after intensive search operations in the locality last night detained one suspect and he acknowledged his involvement in robbing the house.
Sources said the District Police would reveal everything about the theft and its recovery of the medals later today.
Fifty-five-year-old Chowdhury, now living in south Kolkata, was informed by her brother regarding the burglary on Friday and she rushed to her Hooghly home and broke down after seeing all her medals were stolen. Even all the bathroom fittings and Laxmi-Bhandar were also robbed. The family then filed a complaint with the Uttarpara police station and a CID investigation was ordered.
Chowdhury started her swimming career at age of nine and began long-distance swimming. In 1989, she crossed the English Channel and won the 81-km (50-mile) Murshidabad Long Distance Swim in 1996, and in 1999 she crossed the English Channel again.
In 2005 she became the first woman to have swum across sea channels off five continents—including the Strait of Gibraltar, the Tyrrhenian Sea, Cook Strait, Toroneos Gulf (Gulf of Kassándra) in Greece, the Catalina Channel off the California coast, and from Three Anchor Bay to Robben Island near Cape Town, South Africa.
In her first national competition, at age nine, she dominated her age group by winning six gold medals in six events. She continued to improve, winning various junior and national championships, as well as six gold medals at the 1991 South Asian Federation Games.
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