More than 12 days after a 47-year-old man was allegedly kidnapped from Sion, where he was to catch a bus to his hometown in Telangana, police have rescued him in Puducherry and reunited him with his family.
Shankar Hanmaiyya Mathmalla is being treated at Sion hospital for the injuries he sustained in the assault by his kidnappers and is not in a condition to record his statement, a police officer said.
Sanjay Patil, deputy commissioner of police, zone IV, said a search is on to arrest the culprits.
According to police, Mathmalla landed at the city airport from Dubai on June 22. He was carrying nearly ₹11 lakh in Dirhams which he had saved after two years of working in housekeeping there.
He then left for Sion to take the bus to his hometown at Nandgiri in Jagtial district. Mathmalla had informed his son Harish of his arrival a day before, and was in touch with him throughout his journey.
“As my father had a Dubai number, he called me from the mobile phone of his fellow traveller, a Chennai-based person, after he landed in Mumbai and said that he had booked a bus ticket from Sion to Jagtial. Since the other person wanted to go to Chennai via bus, they travelled together to Sion from the airport in a taxi,” Harish said in his complaint filed with the Sion police on June 30.
Later, his father called him from the same number and said that the bus was cancelled and the tour operator had arranged another bus the next day and that they had checked into a hotel in Sion for the day’s stay, the complaint said.
When Mathmalla failed to reach home as expected on June 24, his family got worried. The next day, Harish along with his uncle and a friend came to Mumbai and enquired with the travel agency office. Agency officials, however, told them that Mathmalla had come to their office with another person and got his ticket cancelled.
“While Harish was looking for his father in Sion, he received a call from an unknown number on June 27. The caller was his father, who told him that he was in a hospital in Chennai and then the call got disconnected,” the police officer quoted above said.
A few hours later, Harish got a call from another number demanding a ransom of ₹15 lakh for releasing his father. The kidnappers offered to drop his father in Hyderabad once they got the money, the officer added.
Meanwhile, two teams headed by senior police inspector Manoj Hirlekar and inspector Santosh Shewale of Sion police station were formed. Their first step was to zero in on the Chennai man.
During investigations, it was found that he had taken Mathmalla to Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu by air from Mumbai. There, he kept Mathmalla in an unknown location with the help of his two accomplices. The kidnappers allegedly assaulted Mathmalla and sent his photo to his son.
Later, they had to admit him to a hospital in Tiruchirappalli and during this period they allowed Mathmalla to speak to his son briefly. Though the investigators traced the call to Kauvery Hospital, the kidnappers had shifted Mathmalla to some other place by the time the police teams reached Tiruchirappalli, another police officer said.
“The Chennai man who took Mathmalla to Puducherry made his acquaintances make the ransom calls to his son using different mobile numbers. He seems to be the brain behind the crime and appears to have good knowledge of data-based calls through mobile apps that ensure anonymity,” inspector Shewale said, adding that he deliberately cooperated with the police to avoid suspicion.
Panicked after the police teams questioned some of the Chennai man’s relatives in Tiruchirappalli, the kidnappers abandoned Mathmalla outside the municipal corporation office in Karaikal, Puducherry, a police officer said, adding that the accused also informed the local police about the location.
“It was challenging to trace and rescue the person because of the language barrier. However, we managed with the help of the Karaikal police,” said police sub-inspector Deepak Kumbhar who along with head constable Balkrishna Patil and police naik Charan Kharat of Sion police station brought Mathmalla to Mumbai on Sunday.