Police rescue 5-year-old, kidnapped from school bus

Police rescue 5-year-old kidnapped from school bus

A five-year-old nursery student, who was kidnapped from east Delhi area late last month by two armed bikers who climbed aboard a school van full of children and shot at the driver, has been rescued after a shootout in Sahibabad, 40 kms from the national capital, early this morning, police said.

In the shootout that lasted for nearly 30 minutes, the police shot down one of the kidnappers and arrested two others who were injured in the gunfight. At about 1 am, Delhi Police’s crime branch officials raided a flat on the fifth floor of an apartment complex in Shalimar City in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. The shootout started soon after as kidnappers fired at cops.

A video from the shooting site showed blood on the floor of the flat and bullet marks in the netting of a door. The child, sources said, was kept in this apartment for over 10 days.

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The police had been on the trail to catch the kidnappers for the last 10 days, they got a lead when the captors called the parents on January 28 and demanded Rs. 50 lakh ransom.

On January 25, around 14 children were on the bus when the kidnappers blocked it in east Delhi’s Dilshad Gardens. The driver had stopped to pick up a student. A black bike with two men pulled up alongside. The bikers, their faces obscured by helmets, held a gun to the driver’s head and threatened to shoot if anybody raised an alarm.

While one man kept the driver rooted at gunpoint, the other grabbed the five-year-old child. The boy’s sister, who is in Class 3, tried to hold on to him but couldn’t, say sources. When the driver tried to stop them, the men shot him in the leg and ran away with the child.