Victim played smart, kept his calm

NEW DELHI : Cornered by two men with a gun on a dark stretch of road, Saurabh Gupta played it to the wishes of his abductors to save his life. The two men had been riding along his car, near his shop in Paschim Vihar, and when Gupta stopped to ask them why they were doing so, they first tried to put a handkerchief on his mouth and then took out a gun.

Gupta pretended to faint to make sure that the kidnappers did not shoot him. “I would be dead had I not pretended to faint. They had forced me to sniff a solution soaked handkerchief. A gun was pointed to my head. I pretended to fall unconscious,” said Gupta, the owner of a retail electronics chain.

“It was ill fated from the start . I did not take my usual route from my Paschim Vihar showroom to Karampura home that night . I chose a shorter route that I rarely take. Less than a kilometre away from my shop, I found two men on a bike next to my car,” Gupta told HT after his rescue on Monday.

Remembering how he was taken, Gupta said one of the men put his hand inside the open window of his car and tried to force him to sniff the handkerchief. As the police would later find out, a pain killer was sprayed on the cloth to make the victim lose consciousness. “Initially, I tried to fight with them but one of them put out a pistol to my head. I had to do something and pretended to fall unconscious.”

Gupta said it was nearly after an hour and a half that they finally stopped the car and took him inside a room.

“I managed to free myself and removed the mask too. They had taken off all the light bulbs and sealed the windows and all other gaps with cardboard. It was impossible to make night from day as I would realize the next morning i.e. on Sunday when they came to wake me up. They tied my legs again and left soon. All the time they spent there they only murmured,” said Gupta.

He was allowed to talk to his

Peera Garhi Sunder Vihar

Vikaspuri Janakpuri

family once and his conversations with the accused was also limited. “They offered me food and water but I refused as I suspected they had spiked it.”

It was not till Monday morning that he could heave a sigh of relief. “One of them came to me 15 minutes before the police raid, asking what had I done as his(kidnappers) family members were being questioned at a police station. I said I was clueless as my phone was with them all along,” said Gupta.

He said he did not remember Manish, his kidnapper who once worked for him. “We employ around 800 people. It gets difficult to keep track of each one of them,” said Gupta.