Hindustan Times (Delhi)

‘Abducted’ boy

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Zaid’s body was curled up inside the box, two feet high and two-and-a-half feet wide. He was dressed in the same school uniform he was wearing when he had gone missing. The discovery raises questions about the police’s previous investigat­ion and about whether he had been abducted at all. It is also not clear whether the body had been lying in the box for the past 18 months or if it was stuffed into it later.

“There are a lot of possibilit­ies in the case and we have ordered further investigat­ion. The DNA of the body will be matched first to ascertain whether it is of the same child. The two accused, who are out on bail, will also be questioned. Autopsy is also being conducted,” said senior superinten­dent of police Vaibhav Krishna.

The Mohammads and the Momeens have been on good terms over 15 years of living next to the each other. Momeen said that he got the chest from one of his relatives and had kept it on the rooftop in November 2016, a month before Zaid’s disappeara­nce.

“I remember that, after my daughter’s marriage in November 2016, I had stored some of my belongings on the first floor of my house, and some, including the chest, on the rooftop. The box with the body inside appeared to be at the same location where I had left it,” Momeen said.

He said the box was sealed when he put it on the roof that and he’d had no reason to open it since then.

Zaid was the fifth of six siblings and was studying in nursery at Happy Public School in Sahibabad’s Garima Garden.

“After he went missing, I received nearly 45 calls from the kidnappers asking for Rs 8 lakh as ransom. The first call was on December 12, 2016. The kidnappers also made me speak to my son but I felt at the time that it was not my son who spoke to me on phone and probably some other child,” Nazar said.

Nazar collected Rs 8 lakh and went to Ballabhgar­h on December 17, 2016 to hand over the ransom money to the alleged kidnappers after coordinati­ng with the police. “They called me up and asked to meet outside the railway station. When two of them arrived, one was nabbed by a police team in plaincloth­es while the other fled. He was arrested two days later. Since that day, the police could not extract the whereabout­s of my son from the kidnappers. I even approached the kidnappers in court, but they never spoke to me,” Nazar added.

He said that the police kept telling him that his son could not be traced and investigat­ion was continuing.

One of the investigat­ing officers who asked not to be named said there was a possibilit­y that two “fake” kidnappers had started calling the boy’s father for ransom after they came to know that the boy had gone missing. and three to Go Air. The DGCA had grounded the planes after three incidents of mid-air engine problems in less than a month.

In April, both Indigo and Go Air said that all 14 grounded jets were back in operation. On April 5, minister of state for civil aviation Jayant Sinha told Parliament that 11 of the 14 grounded aircraft had started flying after “changing the engines”. P&W president Robert F Leduc had said in March that the grounded aircraft would be back in operation by April-end.

Indigo is both the largest current operator of the A320 Neo and the top customer in the country. Air India and Vistara also fly the A320 Neo, but those are powered by CFM engines, made by a joint venture between General Electric Co. and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines SAS. Following the grounding of the aircraft, while Indigo had cancelled a total of 776 flights between March 13 and April 2, Goair did not operate 336 flights during the period.

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