Hostage dies in police botch-up

Vijay Upadhyay
Agra. It was the biggest case of kidnapping in the criminal history of Etah district in UP that involved a ransom of Rs 3 crores but 18 days later, after having made the biggest blunder in solving the crime, Etah Police is only left with the victim's decomposed body and an escaped criminal.

As the high-profile case of seed trader Sunit Chola's abduction came to a grisly yet sad climax with the recovery of his decomposed body from a 6 feet deep pit, Etah Police's modus operandi in handling this case has left a number of questions that remain unanswered.
Chola, a seed trader in Kasganj, had been kidnapped by unknown goons on August 13, who had demanded Rs 1 crore cash and 2 kg gold on a phone call to the trader's family.
The call, made from Chola's mobile, was tracked down and placed under electronic surveillance by the police, revealing that Chola could be located in the ravines of Fatehpur Kalan, about 25 km away from Kasganj.
Though the investigation was going by the book till then, the police, however, repeatedly made slips, first by leaking the information that they were aware of the trader's kidnapping and the ransom demand and then by revealing that they were constantly monitoring the trader's mobile and had triangulated on the Katri area of Fatehpur Kalan as his possible location.
The worst mistake made by the police that probably claimed the life of the trader was the arrests of the family members of the suspect Avdhesh Yadav after which the ransom calls finally stopped coming and the police was left dumfounded with no clues to the whereabouts of either the suspect or the kidnapped trader.
Finally, when the suspect did fall into the hands of Etah Police with the help of the Crime Branch of Delhi Police, it was too late. Interrogated by the police, Avdhesh revealed that when the police's trail grew hot, he and his other accomplices in crime thought it best to kill the trader and dispose off the body. Thus murdered, Sunit's body was buried in a 6 feet deep pit in a farm outside the Fatehpur Kalan village.
But the worst was yet to come. When the police was busy digging out the body of the deceased trader, Avdhesh managed to escape from police custody, a lapse that fuelled the already sizzling anger of the Kasganj traders who came out on the roads demanding action against the entire investigation team for behaving irresponsibly and causing the trader's death.
Taking the matter seriously, Etah SSP Ramit Sharma accepted that the case had been handled irresponsibly by the investigation team.
Sharma said that he had suspended a sub-inspector and two constables for having allowed the criminal to escape and the police was contemplating on setting up an inquiry into the lapses committed by the investigation team in the handling of the case.

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