The seizure include a gold-coated conch weighing two kg and worth Rs 60 lakh, four elephant figurines, two silver idols of deities Anjaneya and Ugra Narasimha Swamy, and 95 bronze coins worth several crores.
According to the police, Aswathnarayan, 38, bought the items from Prabhu who procured them from Mariswamy alias Chaddiswamy. Recently, Chaddiswamy met Muthurayappa, a schoolteacher, and his brother Nagarajappa, at Lakkenahalli near Kolar. He told them a treasure was buried in their farmland and he would help recover it and collected several lakhs of rupees from them.
He managed to fool the brothers by recovering the conch in a fraudulent manner. In a similar fashion, he also fooled Swamygowda of Mallasandra of Gubbi taluk and helped him recover elephant idols, Anjaneya and Ugra Narasimha idols, and a few coins of the medieval period from a farmland at Hunsur.
Unable to sell the items, Swamygowda returned them to Chaddiswamy who requested Prabhu to sell them and Prabhu managed to sell them to Ashwathnarayan, said the police.
In another incident, police arrested Yogendra (32) from Bhyraveshwarnagar and recovered a gold-coated Ganapathi idol belonging to the 1818 era and costing several crores of rupees.
North Division police recovered property, including vehicles, jewellery, antique idols, cash and electronic gadgets worth over Rs 2.82 crore over the last 20 days, by arresting 92 suspects involved in as many as 125 cases.
The cases include house burglaries, vehicle thefts and robberies reported in Mahalakshmi Layout, Hebbal, Yeshwanthpura and Malleswaram.