Arrest in techie kidnap case

westbengalsmallPratik Bharti,

INVC,

KOLKATA: After arresting on Friday the leader of the gang that carried out the abductions of IT engineers, police have nabbed ground planner Zulfikar Lashkar, too. While detective department sleuths picked up Alanga Baidya, South 24-Parganas police arrested Lashkar.

Baidya and Lashkar are two of the four criminals who carried out the operation under the instructions of their bosses who ran the racket from Alipore jail. Zulfikar allegedly escorted the victims from Joynagar to Jamtala in South 24-Parganas and arranged a bike to take them 5km away to a hideout owned by Alanga.

Joint CP (crime) Pallab Kanti Ghosh said they have recovered Rs 80,000 in cash, a laptop belonging to Baguiati victim Randhir Jha, a data card and two pen drives belonging to the victims and the phone used by Zulfikar to keep in touch with mastermind Sanjeet Purkayat in jail. tnn”But more importantly – days after we recovered the smartphone used to contact the victims from Alipore jail — we also recovered the phone used by Zulfikar to keep in touch with mastermind Sanjeet Purkayat in the jail,” said Ghosh.

“We have also identified two more persons and hope to arrest them in the next few days,” he added.

The arrests will help sleuths track the route taken by the kidnappers and their hiding places. “Our investigation has revealed that the accused planned well in advance. They had in fact identified three different places — largely under-construction buildings — to confine their victims. Police have been granted custody of the accused. Once we question him, we hope to get more leads. We need to know if some Bangladeshi criminals, too, were involved,” said a source.

Explaining the modus operandi, police said the mastermind Sanjit Purkayat used his cellphone to sign up with web-based services that offer contacts of business houses. “He used a well known search-service website to collect data about small IT firms and IT executives and prepared a list of potential victims. Sanjit called up the victims and offered them lucrative projects. He would then ask them to come down to Joynagar. Once the victims reached the spot, he would call them up yet again and explain that he had to attend an important board meeting. However, they were not aware of the paying power of their victims. Hence, they settled for anything that they could lay their hands on. While they demanded Rs 10,000 from a victim, they managed to squeeze out Rs 7 lakh from the New Alipore victim” an investigator said.

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