A 43-year-old suspected Indian kidnapper, Sumit Sood, who was arrested for allegedly abducting three students from Bishop Cotton School in Shimla district, initially tried to pin the crime on an imaginary Nigerian gang, PUNCH Metro learnt on Wednesday.
According to The Indian Express, police said that after abducting the students, Sood made “calls through a virtual number to their parents,” pretending that he had been forced by “a gang of Nigerian citizens” to demand ransom.
He allegedly instructed that the ransom be paid in Bitcoin and warned the parents “not to inform anyone, especially the school management, otherwise the gang members would harm the children and him.”
Shimla Superintendent of Police, Sanjeev Gandhi, told The Indian Express, “The virtual calls were made through the TextMe app. The suspect wanted the ransom money to be paid in Bitcoin.
“The examination of Sood’s cell phone suggests that he searched and scrolled more than three dozen websites, local news channels, and the BCS website to check whether the news of abduction had spread.”
Gandhi added that when Sood learnt around 8 pm on Saturday that reports of the missing students had surfaced, “he planned to shift them from his Kokunala village to Chandigarh.
“Sood had kept the students at his three-storey house in Kokunala due to its remote location. “No one was at the house when he brought them there. Before committing the crime, Sood stole his father’s licensed pistol.”
Detailing the suspect’s movements before the kidnapping, the SP said, “The night before, he stayed at his maternal grandparents’ home in Shimla’s Ram Bazar.
“He avoided CCTV by taking the Bemloi-New Shimla road and waited for more than four hours in his car, with a fake number plate, parked about 100 metres from the school gate. He even urinated in a bottle inside the car.”
During a crime scene reconstruction, police said Sood identified the spot near Dhalli where he blindfolded the three students, the location where he changed his car’s registration plate, and the routes he used to reach his Kokunala house near Kotkhai on August 9.
Sood was scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday (yesterday).
In a separate but similar case last month, The Times of India reported that 39-year-old Nigerian national Frank Nandi told an Indian court that officers of the Worli unit of the Anti-Narcotics Cell had planted drugs on him after arresting him in Mumbai’s Malad area.
Police, however, maintained that Nandi was apprehended following a tip-off and that during a search of his bag near PJ Colony on Orlem Marve Road, they recovered 200 grams of white powder, which preliminary tests confirmed to be cocaine.
