Sketched to perfection

The kidnapped boy helped the police in solving his own kidnapping

In August of 1995, six-year-old Dushyant, a cardiologist’s son, became the hero of Vadodara with his photo adorning the front page of local dailies. He had helped the police nab his kidnappers.

Two weeks earlier, the culprits had waylaid him on some excuse as he was walking from the school bus to his class. Within half an hour, they called his residence, broke the news of the kidnapping, and asked for Rs 1 lakh as ransom. The sensational crime shattered the peace of a quiet town.

I was a DCP in the city, and the incident had occurred in my area. From the modest ransom, when the cardiologist could have paid more, we guessed that the kidnappers were novices who could panic at the slightest threat and harm the boy to destroy evidence. So the child’s safety was our priority.

Dushyant’s parents were brave enough to involve the police from the beginning, despite the kidnappers’ threat against it. We set up a decoy operation to deliver the ransom and trap the culprits, but they got wind of it, and no one came to collect the drop. Instead, the kidnappers threatened the family over the phone to withdraw police or else they would kill the boy. So we withdrew.

The next morning, to everyone’s relief, the boy was dropped off at the school gate by an autorickshaw driver. Later, the father told me that after the police had withdrawn, the kidnapper had called again, asking for the ransom. So, to save his son, he paid the ransom without informing us.

I assured him that he had done the right thing, and we decided to cool off for a few days to let the boy recover from the trauma.

Two days later, the boy’s mother came to my office along with Dushyant and showed me some sketches the boy had made. Apparently, he was good at drawing, and his mother had encouraged him to draw the places where the kidnappers had taken him.

The drawings were fairly indicative. In one, the boy had drawn a river with a boat in it and a temple on the bank with a snake entwined around its dome. The other was a two-story building with a staircase in the middle. The boy told me that he had been taken to the temple and from there to a theatre to watch the film Sabse bada khiladi. He was kept in the building shown in the other sketch, in room no. 11. I was amazed at the details the boy had remembered.

A team headed by a sub-inspector scoured the area around Vadodara to trace the locations matching the sketches. In two weeks, the team cracked the case. They located the Shiv temple on the bank of the river Narmada at Bharuch. The other building turned out to be the hostel of a polytechnic college.

The team nabbed four youths, all students of the polytechnic college, and recovered the unspent amount of the ransom. They had committed the crime for money to buy fancy clothes and motor cycles.