In Vikhroli, on Monday afternoon, a twelve-year-old boy went missing. A short while later, his elder sister received a text message demanding Rs five lakh as ransom. The sister immediately approached the Parksite police station in Vikroli East. The police registered a case of kidnapping against unknown persons and began inquiries. Mumbai’s Crime Branch Unit VII, too, conducted parallel investigations into the case.
Several relatives joined in the search for him, including the sister’s ex-husband, who had divorced her around a year ago. The man told the police that he had come out of concern and wanted to help. A Crime Branch officer said, “Since the victim was too old to wander off on his own or to be bodily kidnapped in broad daylight without attracting attention, we were working on the assumption that he had been kidnapped by someone known to him. We started looking into the movements and antecedents of the people related or well known to him.”
On Tuesday evening, the boy was found at Mumbra railway station by some railway policemen, who contacted the Parksite police and handed him over to them. The police tried to get information from the victim, but he was too traumatised to give a coherent statement.
The police then went back to examining the movements of the most logical suspects, and the sister’s ex-husband became a prime suspect as, by this time, the police had learned that the divorce battle had been a bitter one. An officer said, “We analysed his call data records to get a sense of his movements over the past couple of days, and also questioned him intensively. After being quizzed for several hours, he broke down and confessed to have kidnapped the victim.”
DCP (Detection I) Mohan Dahikar said: “The accused was angry at his wife over the trouble that he had faced, and wanted to teach her a lesson. He has also claimed that he had also spent a lot of money on her as well as her mother in the past, and wanted to get the money back. This is why he hatched the plan and executed it with the help of an accomplice. However, he later developed cold feet, and took the victim to Mumbra, and abandoned him there.”
Following the ex-husband’s confession, the police placed him under arrest on Wednesday morning and traced and apprehended his accomplice as well.
