Testing love: Man fakes kidnapping to see if live-in partner 'cared enough'

Ahmedabad: A man's insecurities about his live-in partner has landed him in trouble. The case involving 23-year-old Mehul Joshi and his 18-year-old girlfriend have come to light from Rajkot in Gujarat. Joshi was arrested after police launched a full-scale manhunt to track him down based on the presumption that he had been abducted.

However, he told investigators that he staged his own kidnapping to see how much his 'girlfriend loved him'.

Joshi's plan commenced on Tuesday when he left home on the pretext of going to the office but disappeared. He then changed the SIM card of his mobile phone and made threatening calls to his girlfriend from a different number. He even used a voice changer application to avoid suspicion. By pretending to be the kidnapper, he told his girlfriend to pay a ransom amount of ₹3 lakh if she wished to see him again. He further told her to come to Gandhidham with the money.

Instead of complying with his demands, the girlfriend approached the police and registered a complaint. Officers traced Joshi to a lodge in Gandhidham using his cellphone location. However, they found out that he had fled the guest house before their arrival. A team of policemen then managed to track him down at the bus stand in Bhuj where he was taken into custody. During interrogation, the 23-year-old confessed to staging his own abduction in order to 'test' his live-in partner's love for him.

He has been booked under section 182 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which corresponds to charges of providing false information to government officials with the intention of misleading them. According to a report, police officers familiar with the case said that they suspected foul play after discovering that the boy was living alone at the lodge in Gandhidham.

A similar case was reported from Hyderabad where a 16-year-old boy faked his own kidnapping. He disappeared on October 11 of this year and later called his parents and demanded ransom in return for his safe return. He was apprehended and taken into custody by police after his mother alerted investigators about an online ticket he booked to Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh.

Similarly, a man was arrested in Oklahoma after police found out that he staged his own abduction to gain sympathy from his ex-girlfriend. Tulsa resident Darrius Steve Roberts did a vanishing act in May of this year. However, his plan was foiled by a task force of the Tulsa Police Department which included investigators from the Special Investigations Division, homicide detectives and Fugitive Warrants unit.