New Delhi, July 30: A teenage student was found murdered in South Delhi’s Vasant Kunj area on Wednesday morning, a day after he was reported kidnapped for ransom from near his West Delhi house. The police said Ribbu Chawla was killed even though his father paid Rs 20 lakh — a third of their Rs 60-lakh demand — as ransom, as demanded by the abductors, late Tuesday night.
Police said Ribbu, 16, was returning from school when he was abducted barely metres from his apartment complex. Ribbu was a Class XI student of KR Mangalam School in Vikaspuri and lived in SBI Apartments in the same area.
A day on, a passerby found the boy’s body in a desolate place near Ryan International School in Vasant Kunj around 9 am. Chawla was identified from the school emblem on his uniform. The police suspect he was strangulated first, before the assailants “inflicted knife injuries on him”.
According to the FIR (number 217/09) lodged by the boy’s father, Sanjay Chawla, a businessman, he came to know about the abduction at 2.45 pm on Tuesday. The FIR says Ribbu was kidnapped from outside Ujjwal Apartments.
Chawla’s friend Sushant said yesterday he was on a motorbike and Ribbu was riding a Scooty when a Wagon-R came from behind and hit their two-wheelers. Sushant stays close by. His father Sanjeev today said Sushant told him that three or four men came out and forced Ribbu into the car and sped off.
The Abductors’ Call
According to the FIR, Sanjay Chawla got the first ransom call — it was made from Ribbu’s cellphone — at 4.15 pm. He got several calls within the next few hours, with the alleged abductors demanding a ransom of Rs 60 lakh — to be paid in three installments.
A police officer said the abductors rang up from different areas, which made it difficult to trace their location.
The assailants asked Chawla to come to a secluded area in Rohini. Chawla, who had informed the police about the incident by then, went there around 1.30 am and paid what the abductors had sought: the first ransom installment of Rs 20 lakh.
The Body Found
An officer said Ribbu’s body was found with the hands and legs tied up, and the mouth gagged. There were strangulation marks on the neck, the officer said.
Police sources said they suspect involvement of an insider, though nothing is confirmed yet. “We are questioning some people and taking help of witnesses to prepare sketches of the assailants — there were at least three of them, aged between 20 and 22,” a source said.
Vikas Puri police have registered a case of kidnapping-cum-murder and the Station House Officer is investigating the case.
This morning, forensic and crime experts inspected the murder spot and lifted fingerprints, even as the police tried to reconstruct the crime scene. The source said, “Inspection of the spot suggests Ribbu Chawla was murdered inside the forest area and his body was later dragged out and left in the open, possibly for passersby to see it.
The assailants seem to have tried to choke him to death first before inflicting knife injuries.”
“It seems the kidnappers killed the boy for fear of being arrested.”
School principal Lily Mathew said, “We didn’t know about the abduction till we called up his house today.”
A source said the police have sought a list from the school of students who passed out in the last two years.
Did cops wait too long?
The police might have made a fatal delay in apprehending Ribbu’s kidnappers when his father Sanjay Chawla went to pay the first installment of the ransom late Tuesday night, according to a relative.
A police source said they knew Chawla was going to pay the first installment to the abductors but waited to nab the accused when the second payment would have been made. “We planned everything to be done at the time of the second payment,” the source said, “but the assailants killed the boy after accepting Rs 20 lakhs.”
The source said the assailants dodged the police by making ransom calls from different locations. “If they made one call from Karnal (Haryana) then they made another from Wazirabad in North Delhi. They kept their locations, and that led to confusion.”
The source said Ribbu’s friend Sushant gave a registration number of the car the assailants allegedly came but “we could not find a car by that number despite checking scores of vehicles”.
–Agencies