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> >Case 60/2017: Rubina-Salim's 3 year old daughter Falak goes missing
(Ep
848/849 on 26/27 Aug, 2017 Crime Patrol Satark) > >
Part 1
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Part 2
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kidnapped and strangled was alive. >
Three-year-old Zunera Ahmed, strangled with a cord hours after her teenaged
neighbour allegedly kidnapped her, had been dead for 19 days before the family
began getting the ransom calls.All the while, her body lay on a terrace an
arm’s length from her tenement home at Duncan Road in Nagpada, bundled in a
bag, the stench camouflaged by a runnel down below, while cops searched every
manhole and lane to find her.
The accused teen, who goes to college in south Mumbai, was aided by a friend
and, the child’s parents now suspect, also by his family, who allegedly did
their darnedest to throw cops off their scent with fibs and false help.
The main accused and his friend were produced in the court for juvenile
offenders on Monday and sent to a detention home in Dongri.
On the Saturday of December 24, when the JJ Marg police found Zunera’s body
stashed next to a water tank on the first-floor terrace of a neighbouring
building — 19 days after she went missing — they detained the neighbour and
his college friend, both said to be around 17, though the child’s family is
contesting the age.
During interrogation, the teens admitted to every lurid detail of the
stunningly grim crime: how the main accused knocked her unconscious with
chloroform, how she started bleeding from her nose, how he got scared by her
family’s frantic search, which drove him to throttle her with the cord of a
cell phone charger, before the two of them concealed her body in plain sight
and, weeks later, began making the ransom demand of Rs 1 crore. In court, they
said they had been beaten up by the police before they owned up.
The crime occurred on December 5, and it wasn’t until two weeks later on
December 19, that the two accused made contact with Zunera’s father Mumtaz to
demand Rs 1 crore, thinking the probe was growing cold.
Mumtaz thinks the teen’s family is tangled in the crime, or at least its
cover-up; his father deflected the investigators’ attention away from their
tenement, he alleges. “I should have known from the start. They offered more
help to look for Zunera than anyone else in the neighbourhood. I thought they
were such nice people. But they were trying to hide the crime,” he told
Mirror.
Backing his suspicions, the 37-year-old father said that after he returned
from the vain search for his daughter on December 5, the suspect’s father
approached him around midnight, seemingly helpfully, saying a ‘medicine man’
near Mahim Dargah could divine where Zunera was. “He suggested that I visit
him immediately. I was so frazzled at the time I was willing to do anything to
trace my daughter,” said Mumtaz, a scrapdealer.
So he set off for Mahim straight away, and when he reached around 12:30 am,
the accused’s father called him up. “He asked me where I was and I told him.
He said reassuringly baba would come up with something to find my daughter.”
The so-called baba had nothing to offer beyond empty assurances that Zunera
would return. In desperation, Mumtaz made his way to another such man in CST,
before going to JJ Marg police to lodge a missing complaint. He got home by
3:30 am.
It is over these three hours that Mumtaz suspects the accused dumped the body
on the terrace with the help of his parents. “When I think about it now, it
all falls in place. Everyone was asleep, giving them enough time to get rid of
my daughter’s body,” he said. The police are yet to pick up evidence for his
claim.
Over the following days, the family extended a lot of help to trace Zunera,
Mumtaz said; the suspect himself went to mosques in the area, asking them to
make an announcement about his “missing sister”. “They brought us food. They
also got some priests to our house to pray. The boy’s father gave me a charm
to hang at my door, stating it’d bring luck, and my daughter back.”
Ransom run
Days elapsed. Then on December 19, Mumtaz got the first ransom call. The man
on the other end of the line asked for Rs 1 crore for the safe return of his
daughter. Mumtaz told the cops, who instructed him to engage with the
kidnappers and negotiate the ransom if he gets a call back.
For three days after that, Mumtaz got a call daily, with brusque instructions
to keep the money ready. But he managed to strike up negotiations. “We asked
the child’s father to bargain with the accused, who eventually agreed to
release the girl for Rs 28 lakh,” a police source said.
On the morning of December 23, Mumtaz got a series of 40 calls beginning
before noon, with instructions on how the parley was going to transpire. Over
the next five-odd hours, Mumtaz would keep going back and forth in a train,
his every move dictated by the callers.
The first call at 11.25 am instructed him to be ready to depart with the bag
of money. The next directed him to board a train from CST and head to Titwala,
a far-north central suburb. That’s where a police team got on his tail, even
as many others stationed themselves along the central line tracks to Titwala.
Yet another group of cops was busy tracking all the calls being placed.
After Mumtaz boarded a train at CST, the callers asked him to get off at
Mumbra, about an hour and a half away. “When I told them I had already crossed
Mumbra, they asked me to get off at the next station, Diva, and take a train
back towards CST.”
Mumtaz did as directed. The next call instructed him to fling the cash from
the running train on the tracks between Mumbra and Kalwa. But he said he
wouldn’t until he saw his daughter. They told him she was unconscious. (All
this communication came to pass over many calls, all curt.)
The last call he got, at 5.11 pm, was cut short abruptly: the callers, police
would later find out, had spotted the cops, switched off the phone, and
abandoned the venture.
Mumtaz returned home with the cops, who had enough clues now about the
teenager’s involvement. Other than circumstantial evidence, the kidnapper’s
calls were traced, point after point, to locations matching with the accused’s
cell phone.
The day after, on Saturday, they picked up the suspect and, later, his partner
in crime. Their interrogation yielded a confession, cops said.
The duo had used three different SIM cards, cops said. “By the way they went
about it, the teens seem to have taken their cues from crime shows and films,”
a policeman said.
She’d have turned 4
Until they confessed in custody, Mumtaz had harboured hopes of seeing Zunera
alive.
“It was her birthday on December 21. She would have turned four. Between all
the ransom calls I got that day, I had been praying for her wellbeing, not
knowing she was long gone.”
Mumtaz doubts the main accused is a minor: he says he got to know that the
teen had flunked two years and was, therefore, around 18. Police sources said
they had retrieved the boy’s birth certificate from his school and it
indicates he is a few months older than 17.
On Monday, the accused were produced before the Juvenile Justice Board, which
sent them to the Dongri children’s home. In the court, the main accused said
he had been beaten up by the police, and the court asked for him to be sent
for a medical examination.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (zone I) Manoj Kumar Sharma confirmed that the
main accused was taken for a medical checkup on Monday evening. He said the
police have appealed to the court to try both the accused as adults.
Commenting on Mumtaz’s allegations implicating the the boy’s parents, Sharma
said, “We are questioning the parents as well. We have not found any evidence
against them so far. However, they have not been given a clean chit
either.”
The accused’s family was not available to comment. The house is locked, and
under police watch.
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