‘Kidnapper’ says ransom calls made to boy’s father were fake

One of the two men arrested by the Ghaziabad police 18 months ago for the alleged abduction of four-year-old Mohammad Zaid, said on Monday that they never had the child in their custody. Zaid’s body was found on Sunday, in a wooden box on his neighbour’s roof in Sahibabad. Even in its charge sheet, the police had hinted that the accused -- Aftab and Irfan -may have tried to extort ransom money from the boy’s father under false pretences, rather than being the actual kidnappers.

Zaid went missing on the evening of December 1, 2016 from outside his house in Sahibabad’s Shamshad Garden locality. His father Nazar Mohammad, who runs a barber shop, started receiving ransom calls on December 12, 2016 and the callers asked for R8 lakh. Aftab was arrested by the police on December 21, 2016 in connection with the calls. His accomplice, Irfan, was apprehended two days later.

Zaid’s body was found on Sunday, curled up inside a wooden box on his neighbour Mohammad Momeen’s roof. He was dressed in the same school uniform he had been wearing when he had gone missing. The discovery raises questions about the police’s investigation into the case and about whether Zaid 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 the box more recently.

“The calls were made by Aftab. But the boy was not with us. Aftab had planned to extort money from the boy’s father after he learnt from posters in the locality that the boy had gone missing. He also made the father speak to my son, pretending that he was Zaid,” Irfan, who is out on bail, told HT on Monday.

Nazar Mohammad had told the police at the time that the child who the alleged kidnappers made him speak to did not sound like his son. “The two men are small-time labourers. The cops could not get any information from the two accused about the boy. So they could not press charges for kidnapping for ransom,” said Mohammad Yunus, a lawyer representing Irfan, who is now working as a labour at a brick kiln in Baraut district.