‘Friends’ abduct, murder 20-yr-old Mumbai student

In a scary reminder of the Adnan Patrawala case of August 2007, two ‘friends’ of a second-year Thakur College student abducted him on Monday for ransom and then murdered him.

In a scary reminder of the Adnan Patrawala case of August 2007, two ‘friends’ of a second-year Thakur College student abducted him on Monday for ransom and then murdered him.

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The two accused had to pay debts and plotted to abduct 20-year-old Ganesh Sriram and ask for ransom from his father Ramchandra, a civil contractor. The police recovered Sriram’s body from the Naigaon creek on Wednesday morning and arrested the accused.

Senior police inspector Anil Patil said the main accused, Kalpesh Soni, 25, lived next to Sriram’s Boisar residence and the two knew each other for the past eight years.

“Soni had to pay R1 lakh that he owed Sriram’s father. He was told to make a payment at the earliest...,” said Patil.

Soni who was under pressure to return the money, met his friend Ravindra Yadav, 22, a vegetable vendor who was also in an urgent need of money as he had to pay off debts too.

On Monday Soni phoned Sriram and asked him to meet him at Naigaon, saying he wanted to return the R1 lakh he owed his father.

Yadav was present when Sriram met Soni. “The duo then allegedly took him to a forest on the pretext of collecting the money from someone. There, they smashed his face with a stone and disposed of the body in the Naigaon creek,” said Patil.