Free at last: Banker returns home after four months in captivity

Rizwan Dosani was kidnapped along with his driver near Shikarpur bypass on Dec 15 last year

SUKKUR: For banker Rizwan Dosani, the four months that he spent in the captivity of kidnappers were a period that was stolen from his 40-year life.

The kidnapped banker, who was rescued on Sunday, narrated his ordeal to The Express Tribune on Monday from the safety of his house in Sukkur. Dosani was a regional operations manager at Muslim Commercial Bank in Larkana when he was kidnapped on December 15, 2014. He was going to Kashmore with his driver, Raza Muhammad, when armed men picked him up near the Shikarpur bypass.

"Some armed men forced us out of the car, tossed us into another one and then sped away," Dosani recalled. “They blindfolded the two of us and told us not to make any noise.”

After travelling for a long time, the kidnappers pulled the two men out of the car and chained them to a tree. "The kidnappers kept changing their hideouts from time to time to avoid a police raid," he said.

After one month of captivity, the kidnappers contacted the Dosani family and told them to arrange money for ransom, he said. According to him, the kidnappers used to contact his family sometimes after 10 or 15 days, demanding ransom and threatening them of dire consequences.

Sometimes, his captors would use abusive language against them and torture them but usually their attitude was neutral, he remembered. "We would get two meals a day, mostly potatoes with rice or roti," he said. "This is what they [kidnappers] used to eat themselves."

For Dosani, these four months were the most disturbing time of his life. "I was not certain whether or not I will be able to see my family again," he said. "I used to think that maybe it was my fate to die a miserable death in the captivity of the kidnappers but, at other times, Allah would give me strong faith that made me hope for the best." Now that he is reunited with his family, Dosani felt Allah has given him another chance. "I don't want to recall those painful moments," he said.

The Dosani family has been rejoicing his safe return. "I don't have words to express the pain and misery we went through during the last four months," said his father, Rafiq Dosani, who is a retired general manager of a private bank. "Every morning used to bring new hope but, as soon as night fell, we would become disappointed," he said.

The family appreciated the efforts that Sukkur SSP Tanveer Hussain Tunio made to recover Dosani even though the case fell outside his jurisdiction. Dosani was kidnapped from Shikarpur and his car was found abandoned from Ghouspur in Kashmore-Kandhkot district.

The police officer was constantly in touch with us and would always tell us not to pay ransom as that would encourage the kidnappers who were demanding Rs50 million, recalled Rafiq. He said the police managed to recover Dosani and his driver without paying a single penny. The police also managed to arrest three of the kidnappers with the help of Balochistan IG.

For his part, SSP Tunio said Dosani's kidnapping was one of the more challenging cases he has worked on since his posting to Sukkur in May 2014. "I used different methods of policing and kept on pressurising the kidnappers to release the kidnapped persons without any ransom," he said, adding that they made some arrests while Dosani was in captivity and that led them to release the two victims.

"We were tracking the kidnappers constantly," he pointed out. On Saturday at midnight, his team raided Manjo Shori village in the Tambu tehsil of Naseerabad district in Balochistan. After an exchange of fire, they managed to rescue Dosani and arrest three kidnappers.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 14^th, 2015.