A taxi gone missing from Pathankot and its driver found dead hundreds of kilometres away forced the Delhi police to put the national capital on alert on Friday.
What sent the police into a tizzy was an input that the white Alto taxi might have headed in the direction of the national capital after being “hijacked.”
They immediately took to social networking sites to issue alerts and appeals to dial the police control room number 100 if the taxi with the registration number HP 01D 2440 was spotted anywhere.
The taxi was hired by three unidentified “Punjabi-speaking” men from Pathankot a week ago. The driver, Vijay Kumar, a native of Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, was found dead on a bridge in the same district on Wednesday.
The Pathankot police have learnt that the three “young” men were loaded with backpacks and apparently arrived from outside the town. A CCTV grab of the cab and the suspects has been circulated to obtain clues.
Delhi Police turn to Twitter
The Delhi Police have pinned their hopes on the public to report the presence in the national capital of the car gone missing from Pathankot.
On Friday, the twitter handle of the Delhi Police reached out to media houses in a bid for greater reach-out to the public.
Apart from several tweets and re-tweets, the police posted the picture and the alert message on their twitter handle. Police Commissioner B.S. Bassi himself tweeted the message from his personal account.
The hijacking gains in prominence as only a couple of days ago a blue-beacon flashing SUV, belonging to a senior ITBP officer, was stolen outside his residence in Noida. The police’s concern is that the two vehicles could be misused by terrorists.
After this incident and the recent arrests of terror suspects by the NIA nationwide, the Delhi Police brass met at the India Gate lawns in the afternoon. The aim was protecting the vital installations in the city, with a special emphasis on those in New Delhi.
