Delhi kidnapping: These 4 panels show how police rescued schoolboy

A detailed account of how the police tracked down 5-year-old Vihaan Gupta’s abductors and rescued the boy.

On January 25, five-year-old Vihaan Gupta was kidnapped from his school bus in Dilshad Garden, when two men on a motorcycle barged in and dragged the boy out. When the bus driver tried to stop them, one of the men shot him in the leg.

Five-year-old Vihaan Gupta, after being reunited with his mother in Delhi. (Sonu Mehta/HT PHOTO)

On Tuesday, the child was finally reunited with his family after Delhi police pulled off a risky rescue operation. It took the police 12 days, 18 cops working the case and a final gunfight in which one of the suspected kidnappers was shot dead to rescue the boy from a building in Ghaziabad.

The police tracked CCTV cameras and the multiple calls for ransom made by the abductors, which lead them to the three suspects and an empty two-bedroom flat on the fifth floor of Shalimar City, a housing society in Sahibabad, where Vihaan was being kept.

Here’s a blow-by-blow account of the kidnapping, the chase and the final rescue: