HC LAWYER RESCUED FROM KIDNAPPERS’ CLUTCHES IN LKO, ONE ARRESTED
LUCKNOW: The UP Special Task Force (STF) and the Lucknow police rescued a high court lawyer Preeti Shukla from the clutches of kidnappers here on Tuesday midnight after she had spent 52 hours in captivity, said senior police officials on Wednesday. One alleged kidnapper was arrested during the joint operation, the officials said.
They said car-borne miscreants had kidnapped the woman when she was on an evening walk near her house in the Sushant Golf City area of the state capital on Sunday.
The officials said the woman’s husband Anurag Shukla is also a high court lawyer and known for two highprofile cases related to former Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister Gayatri Prajapati, who is in jail for his alleged involvement in a multi-crore mining case, and another multi-crore case allegedly involving a real estate firm.
A senior police official said the couple purchased two flats together in the posh Sushant Golf City locality and bought two high-end sedan cars in the recent past. He said the arrested kidnapper, identified as Santosh Chaubey, revealed that the couple’s luxurious lifestyle attracted them, and his gang decided to kidnap the woman believing that her husband would pay a hefty ransom for her safe release.
STF deputy superintendent of police (DSP) Deepak Kumar Singh said the kidnappers demanded ₹1 crore from her husband and later settled for ₹25 lakh after multiple negotiation calls. He said the investigation so far suggested that 10
people were involved in the kidnapping plan and nine of them were still at large.
The DSP said Anurag Shukla had lodged the complaint about his wife’s abduction with the Sushant Golf City police station on Sunday itself after getting the ransom call, but the incident was not publicised so that kidnappers did not become aware of the police team’s action plan.
He also stated that the kidnappers had made the ransom calls to the woman’s husband from the woman’s phone by changing their location continuously.
The STF team surrounded a house in a residential locality behind Vidya hospital near Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Science (SGPGIMS) here after tracking the caller’s location.
The woman was found locked inside a room of the house and her limbs were bound with cloth at the time, the DSP added. Chaubey was arrested while the other alleged kidnappers managed to escape, he said.
Four of the alleged kidnappers were identified as Jitendra, Kallu, Rohit and Bablu while the five others were yet to be identified, he said.
Singh said the woman told police that she was abducted by a group of five people in a car.
She said three persons pulled her into the car when she reached a deserted stretch while returning from her evening walk and they gave her a sedative to make her fall unconscious. She said she was continuously kept unconscious and allowed only to go to the toilet during the over 52 hours that she spent in captivity.