66 hard disks stolen from Zoya Akhtar’s production house, office boy arrested

A total of 66 high-capacity hard disks containing sensitive and unreleased film and web series content were allegedly stolen from the Tiger Baby Digital LLP, the production company run by filmmaker Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti. One accused has been arrested so far. 

On May 21,the employees in the production house at Bandra West office found that several hard disks for the ongoing work were missing. Later, the staff allegedly found empty and partially damaged boxes inside the storage cabinets. After that, Mehjabeen Mushtaq Shaikh, an executive assistant with the production house, reportedly filed the complaint at Bandra Police Station.

The complaint reportedly states that out of 119 hard disks, 66 were missing which contained a vast range of digital production material including raw footage edit timelines, post-production backups, advertisement content, and content of unreleased projects. The devices themselves have been valued at between ₹12 to 13 lakhs which have between 16TB to 72TB storage capacity, as per reports.

After the complaint, the police arrested the prime accused Mohammad Shahid Azim Khan who worked as an office boy at the production house, responsible for handling and storing hard disks for several years.

During the interrogation, Khan reportedly confessed to stealing multiple hard disks over the past five months and selling 24 of them to a Borivali based man named Ritesh for approximately ₹15,000 to ₹20,000 each, as per reports.

Police further said that the accused, Ritesh, remains absconding, while Khan has failed to explain the whereabouts of the remaining missing hard disks, leading investigators to suspect the involvement of additional individuals in the theft, the report cited.