Ghaziabad: Young four-year-old Zaid who went missing on the evening of the 1st December 2016, was found in a wooden box on Sunday.
One of the two accused who were involved in making ransom calls to Zaid’s father said they never had the child in the first place. The two accused were arrested by the Ghaziabad Police 18 months ago in the alleged abduction of Zaid, HT reported.
The charge sheet filed by the Police in the case also indicated the two accused Aftab and Irafan may have tried to extort ransom money by falsely claiming to have kidnapped Zaid rather than being the actual kidnappers.
Zaid’s body Zaid who went missing from outside of his house in Sahibabad’s Shamshabad Garden locality was found curled up in a wooden box on his neighbour Mohammad Momeen’s roof in Sahibabad.
Zaid’s father Nazar Mohammad, a barber by profession started receiving extortion calls on December 12, 2016. The callers demanded Rs 8 lakh for Zaid’s release.
Aftab was soon arrested on December 21, 2016 in connection with the calls while his accomplice, Irfan, nabbed two days later.
Zaid was dressed in the same school uniform he had been wearing before he reportedly went missing on December 1st.
Now with the recent discovery of Zaid’s body raises questions on Police’s investigation who had arrested two accused and whether Zaid was actually abducted or not.
It is also not clear whether the body had been lying in the box for the past 18 months or if it was stuffed into the box more recently.
“The calls were made by Aftab. But the boy was not with us. Aftab had planned to extort money from the boy’s father after he learnt from posters in the locality that the boy had gone missing. He also made the father speak to my son, pretending that he was Zaid,” Irfan told.
Zaid’s father Nazar Mohammad too told the police at that time that the boy he spoke to did not sound like his son.
Mohammed Yunus, representing Irfan said: “The two men are small-time labourers. The cops could not get any information from the two accused about the boy. So they could not press charges for kidnapping for ransom,” Irfan is currently out on Bail is working as a labour at a brick kiln in Baraut district.
The Police had then booked the two accused under section Section 386 (extortion) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), but not under Section 364A (kidnapping for ransom).
Zakir Hussain, the lawyer representing Zaid’s case, said he would ask the court to convert the kidnapping case into a ransom against the two accused.
The post-mortem report on Zaid could not clear the mystery of his death as the report did not disclose the time and the cause of death. The police, now said will take the help of forensic science laboratory in Agra to solve the death mystery.
Senior superintendent of police Vaibhav Krishna said that further investigations into the case had been launched. “There are lot of theories on which our teams are working on. They will include questioning family members, neighbours and the two accused. It could also be a probability that someone else harmed the child after knowing that the two accused were sent to jail. We are exploring all angles now,” he said.