Five arrested for kidnapping schoolboy in Gondia, Maharashtra

Five persons have been arrested for allegedly kidnapping a 7-year-old boy for ransom in Maharashtra's Gondia district, police said Wednesday.

The boy, kidnapped on July 3, had been found abandoned the very next day and reunited with his parents.

Vaibhav Prakash Wasnik (23), Shekhar Dulichand Shende (23), both residents of Ghategaon in Sadak Arjun tehsil; Pravin Kailash Patil (22), Rahul Namaji Gavad (19) and Saurabh Balkrishna Gaidhani (19), all residents of Deori, were arrested from Nagpur Tuesday.

It was a joint operation of the Local Crime Branch (LCB) team and Duggipaar police, and all five have confessed to involvement in the crime, said Vinita Sahu, Superintendent of Police, Gondia.

The boy, resident of Ghategaon, was kidnapped from outside the Zilla Parishad school where he studied on July 3 by two men who came on a scooter.

Sahu said she formed five teams of LCB for investigation besides increasing vigil on the roads leading out of the district.

The kidnappers, probably in panick, abandoned the boy trussed up in a gunny sack near Shenda Putali village in Deori tehsil the next day. He was found and reunited with his parents.

To find the kidnappers, the LCB and cyber cell of the police conducted investigations. The investigators got some vital clues after speaking to the boy, and succeeded in nabbing the accused from various places in Nagpur Tuesday, the SP said.

The accused had kidnapped the boy with the intention of extorting ransom from his parents, Sahu said.

The accused were all unemployed young men and none of them had any criminal record, she said. Gavad is son of a policeman.