THANE: The Thane sessions court here has convicted a 26-year-old a man for demanding ransom from the kin of a minor boy who went missing in 2015, but was not in his possession.
In an order passed on Tuesday, district and sessions judge Shailendra Tambe found the accused Kalim Isshaq Ansari guilty of the offences punishable under section 387 of the IPC (whoever, in order to the committing of extortion, puts or attempts to put any person in fear of death or of grievous hurt to that person) and also slapped a fine of Rs 10,000. One other accused in the case, however, was acquitted.
Additional public prosecutor Vinit A Kulkarni told the court that a Vartak Nagar teenager, then aged 15, went missing after which a kidnapping case was filed on March 27, 2015. His parents received a call on April 1, 2015, from the accused who demanded Rs 1 lakh for releasing the ‘abducted’ teenager and threatened to eliminate him if the demand was not met. The police then laid a trap and arrested two persons and detained one juvenile but did not find the boy since he was never abducted by them.
The probe revealed that the accused had made similar calls to many kin of missing or kidnapped children, but the accused never let them hear the voice of the ‘kidnapped’ boys.
A police official said that a writ petition was filed in the high court and the case of the Vartak Nagar boy was handed over to then ACP Bharat Shelke and his team. They traced the boy to Nerul on January 22, 2019, and reunited him with his parents. It was later learnt that the boy had himself left home to work with a caterer fearing he would fail in Class 9. He had actually passed but didn’t know about his results since he had fled before the results came out. The boy was traced after four years during which he ran errands for a caterer.
While Ansari was convicted, the case of the juvenile accused is being dealt with by the juvenile court.
