‘Dad, I got kidnapped’

University student stages his own kidnapping for Rs1 million .

ISLAMABAD: A university student staged his own kidnapping-for-ransom to extract one million rupees from his father. But failed.

Amaar Hassan, a 21 year-old resident of Soan Garden, sent a text message to his father, Squadron Leader (retd) Syed Hassan Farooq Naqvi on Wednesday evening, which said that some unknown people had kidnapped him and were threatening to kill him.

Later, he also talked to his father on the phone.

“My son was weeping and sounded terrified. He said the kidnappers were demanding one million rupees in ransom,” Naqvi told the police.

A police official said, “Many influential people were pressurising us to take immediate action.” The description of the incident before the police was an unusual one. “The kidnappers did not call anyone, not even the father,” he said.

Location of Hassan’s cell phone on police radar led the police to sector G-8, from where they lost him. However, the police decided to check all the guest houses and hotels in the area. It did not take them too long to find Hassan in one of the rooms of Dreamland Hotel in Peshawar Mor area of sector G-9/4. “He had paid an advance of Rs600 at the hotel and rented the room for one night,” said SHO Koral Police Station Sajjad Bukhari. “The boy had used his own cell phone to send text messages and make calls to his father,” said the police.

Why did he stage the drama?

“Me and my friends thought it was the easiest way of extracting money from my father,” Hassan told the police during initial investigations.

Hassan was fond of girls. Along with his friends, he used to spend money on call girls, said a police source. “It was not clear if he was particularly interested in some girl whom he wanted to marry, but there was no doubt that he wanted money to support his (and his friends’) sexual appetite,” the police official added.

Some police officials were concerned that the boy would escape the arrest even after misleading police and wasting government’s resources. “There is no law to detain and punish such people,” they said.

In another development, the city police were able to recover a kidnapped man from a building in sector G-12 . Muhammad Shafique, a resident of G-9/2, went missing on Wednesday and his wife Rashida came to know of his kidnapping.

Police said that the woman informed them on Thursday morning. The kidnappers called the lady to come with her jewellery at a place in Capital Park area where a police party nabbed the two people. The arrest led to the recovery of Shafique from the basement of a building in G-12 and two others were arrested.

The arrested men told the police that Shafique had to return some amount which he had earlier borrowed from them. “They had decided to kidnap him for the recovery of their money because he was adamant on returning the loan despite several requests,” said police sources.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 21^st, 2011.