Bangalore boy fools Delhi Police

A runaway, teenaged boy claiming to be in on a terror conspiracy made the Delhi Police skip a heartbeat last week, sources said.

A runaway, teenaged boy claiming to be in on a terror conspiracy made the Delhi Police skip a heartbeat last week, sources said.

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The situation was such that the Special Cell had to be roped in to verify the ‘intelligence input’ weaned from the Class 9 student, who had run away from his Bangalore residence on July 22. The cell officers, however, were able to gauge the non-veracity of his statement after a couple of minutes of questioning the boy.

“He was whiling away his time at a public park near the Nizamuddin Railway Station when he was approached by a security guard and asked what he was up to. In reply, the boy claimed that he was thinking about a terror plot planned in his presence at a room in Bangalore,” said a senior police officer.

The son of a goldsmith, the 14-year-old, when ushered into a southeast Delhi police station, told officers that he had just escaped after having been kidnapped by ‘terrorists’ and confined in a room with seven other boys.

Thoroughly startled, both because Independence Day celebrations were just a fortnight away and also because Bangalore had been on the radar of the Indian Mujahideen not too long ago, the local police called the Special Cell for help.

“When we questioned the boy, however, and confronted him with what seemed to be loopholes in the story he was peddling, he confessed that he was fibbing,” an officer said.

It turned out that he had run away with Rs 4,000 and his father’s cell phone, to escape the pressure his parents had been putting on him to study harder.