Pakistan boy’s kidnap is global drama | World News - Hindustan Times
close_game
close_game

Pakistan boy’s kidnap is global drama

None | ByThe New York Times/Alan Cowell, Paris
Mar 19, 2010 01:09 AM IST

From the video, it might have seemed a moment as unexceptional as it was fond — a boy playing soccer with his father on a sunlit lawn, sending messages of affection back home to his mother.

From the video, it might have seemed a moment as unexceptional as it was fond — a boy playing soccer with his father on a sunlit lawn, sending messages of affection back home to his mother. “Mummy, I miss you,” the boy with the shaved head and big eyes tells the camera at the prompting of his father. “Mummy, I love you.”

HT Image
HT Image

But the images of Sahil Saeed, age 5, and his father, Raja, made public on Thursday, offered a closing chapter in a harrowing saga of kidnappers, cops, ransom and surveillance that reached from Pakistan’s Punjab Province to the streets of Paris and, finally, to a suitcase stuffed with used bills in an apartment house near Barcelona, Spain.

Hindustan Times - your fastest source for breaking news! Read now.

The remarkable trail led police to arrest three suspects in Spain and two in Paris.

Sahil and his father, both from Oldham in northwest England, were on vacation with relatives in Jhelum, Pakistan, when armed robbers burst into the house where they were staying on March 4 and seized the boy, demanding $155,000 for his release.

Kidnappings for ransom are not unusual in Pakistan, but this one became prime-time, front-page news in Britain while the boy’s whereabouts remained a mystery — until Tuesday when the boy was found wandering and alone in fields near Jhelum.

The police got their first break when a call from the kidnappers to Sahil’s father, demanding ransom, was traced back to Spain.

The callers told Saeed, 28, to go to Manchester. When he got there, he was told in another phone call to head on the Paris with the ransom. As Sahil’s father handed over the ransom money to two people on a street in Paris, a surveillance team tracked the exchange and followed it to the village of Constanti in northeast Spain.

When Sahil walked free thousands of miles away in Pakistan, a Spanish SWAT team stormed an apartment house near Barcelona and seized roughly $147,500 of the ransom money, cellphones and a computer.

The Spanish police also arrested two Pakistani men and a Romanian woman, who was accused of having travelled to Paris with one of the men to take the ransom.

Unlock a world of Benefits with HT! From insightful newsletters to real-time news alerts and a personalized news feed – it's all here, just a click away! - Login Now!

Get Latest World News along with Latest News from India at Hindustan Times.
SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON
Share this article
SHARE
Story Saved
Live Score
OPEN APP
Saved Articles
Following
My Reads
Sign out
New Delhi 0C
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Start 14 Days Free Trial Subscribe Now
Follow Us On