Before it could forget the December 2010 kidnapping and murder of Class-I student Khushpreet, Chandigarh now had a toddler to rescue in February 2011. Public anger was building up again, so the cops could not risk another error.
Two-year-old boy Prince was kidnapped from outside his house in Bapu Dham Colony, Sector 26. His kidnappers had demanded Rs 5 lakh ransom. His family wasn’t rich but this gang believed it had saved some money to buy a house. Inspector Amanjot, who was part of the investigation team, said: “The clock was ticking. Come what may, we had to rescue the child. We had the example of Khushpreet’s case, in which the delay and confusion caused by some top officials had cost us a child’s life. This time, we decided to follow our instincts and ignore all the noise.”
“There is this one thing common with all kidnappers,” the inspector said, “They meet only once. That gives you a small window of 2 to 3 minutes to capture them. Call it a law, a principle, or a fact. You lose these 3 minutes, you miss them.”
Khushpreet’s kidnapping changed a lot of things. People stopped sending their children out to play or leaving them unattended. The shadow of fear and mistrust hung over the city for a long time.
Top cops had become a standing joke. It is still believed in police circles that Khushpreet could have been saved in 2010 had the officers in the field not followed their orders to halt the chase for a few minutes and then continue. A slight deviation from the plan and a big violation of the “basic principle” of all kidnappings earned the police department a lot of shame. This was the time to right the wrongs.
Jungle rescue
The cops were able to trace the ransom call to Bapu Dham dwellers Amarpal and Banwari, and arrest them from Sector 26 after busting their two minutes of meeting. Mastermind Amarpal was made to call his accomplices in Una and order them to bring the child back to Chandigarh, saying “the ransom has been paid”.
An ambush was laid on the kidnappers’ expected return route through Ropar but they could be in any vehicle, and police had a small window again—a kind of situation where they had missed Khushpreet. The inspector said: “We saw two men on a motorcycle with a blanket tucked between, which raised a doubt, so we followed them.” If they have something to hide, they’ll try to flee. If not, they’ll stay calm.
True to the hunch, just as police approached the men and asked about the blanket, they tried to scoot. About 4 kilometres down, they fell off the bike along with the toddler. One of them got up and ran into the nearby jungle but was caught again. These men, Suresh and Surra, were vegetable vendors from Sector 26 like the other two.
Amarpal turned out to be the toddler’s maternal uncle, who knew about the little sum that the child’s parents had kept for the house. It was he who passed Prince to Surra, one of Prince’s neighbours, who along with Suresh took the boy to Naina Devi pilgrim town in Una, Himachal Pradesh.
