In a morning heist, two youths on Monday took away at gunpoint gold and silver worth Rs 40 lakh and a lakh in cash from a third-floor store on Digambar Jain Temple Road, in the Posta area.

?It appears the duo had been told that a lakh in cash was kept at the shop. We are trying to find out whether the employees of the shop had collaborated with the robbers in any way,? said an officer of Posta police station.

The shop had six employees. They converted gold biscuits into the precious metal for making ornaments.

According to police, the youths turned up at the shop around 10.30 am, soon after the arrival of manager Vinod Suryavanshi. As he opened the shop and walked inside, the men followed.

As soon as Suryavanshi switched on the lights, the robbers overpowered him. The youths then beat the manager up and demanded the keys to the shop?s locker with a gun pointed at his head.

With no one around and unable to scream for help, the manager had to hand over the keys to the youths.

The robbers then tied Suryavanshi with a rope and grabbed whatever they could ? including 1.7 kg of raw gold and about 10 kg of silver. The youths walked down the stairs and melted into the crowd.

?No one realised what had happened in the shop. Many thought that the two were customers and didn?t bother to probe deeper,? said the owner of a shop on the first floor of the building.

The heist came to light around 40 minutes later, when one of the six employees of the store arrived for work.

Preliminary investigations suggest that the youths were aware that the shop-owner, who has another store in Bowbazar, would turn up late on Monday. He and the manager opened the shop on most days.

The officers are investigating the backgrounds of the six employees of the shop and whether they had a hand in the heist.

An officer of the detective department asserted that the youths would not have dared to turn up at the store at that hour unless an insider had briefed them.