Raipur: Kidnapped child rescued, police dragnet forced gang to free him

RAIPUR: Durg police have rescued five-year-old Maulik Sahu less than 24 hours after he was kidnapped from his school van on Tuesday.


Cornered by the intense police hunt and barricading of roads and highways, the kidnappers abandoned the child in Rajnandgaon and fled. Police teams are tracking them and hope to arrest them soon.

Durg IG Himanshu Gupta said 25 teams were deployed across the Durg Range to rescue the child, and the pressure forced kidnappers to let him go. There was no ransom call, he added.

Maulik, the son of a businessman, was abducted by two masked bikers at knife point on Tuesday morning. Police immediately swung into action and set up barricades to prevent their escape.

The region was cordoned off. There were inputs that the kidnappers were trying to escape to neighbouring districts but they couldn't because of the tight checking even on small roads. Teams of policemen searched empty houses inside the city and vehicles were checked.

Police were perhaps wary of a repeat of the kidnapping in Madhya Pradesh's Chitrakoot last year in which a gang held two five-year-old twins hostage in an abandoned house that cops failed to check. The brothers were murdered by their kidnappers about 12 days later.

In Durg, however, police teams fanned out and searched all abandoned houses. After scanning CCTV footage of the likely routes the masked kidnappers may have taken, police started narrowing down their search.

The kidnappers felt the dragnet closing in and abandoned the child at 2am on Wednesday on a road in Rajnandgaon's Somani, about 40km from the place of abduction.

"They freed Maulik by the roadside for fear of being caught," a police officer said. A police team led by SP Prakhar Pandey spotted the boy near Somani police station and rescued him. He is safe and stable and was handed over to his parents.

Police said that the child has indicated the involvement of a woman in the gang. She was continuously scolding him not to cry, he has told cops. The kidnappers fed him dal-rice and biscuits.

His family is celebrating his safe return. They have told police that Maulik's father had recently cracked a lucrative land deal and the kidnappers perhaps knew that. Officers said eight police teams have been set up to track down the kidnappers.

IG Gupta said they have zeroed in on the place where the boy was kept, and police hope to nab the kidnappers soon.