Bengaluru: The police now suspect that someone close to the family was in touch with the abductors of Nishchith, the 13-year-old schoolboy, whose charred body was recovered at a deserted location in Bengaluru on Thursday. On Friday, two suspects, Gurumurthy alias Shivaprakash (25) and Gopikrishna (27), were taken into custody after an encounter with the police. Both were shot in the leg after they allegedly attacked members of the police team that managed to track them down.
The police are now waiting for them to recover sufficiently before starting interrogations. Only after that will a clearer picture emerge.
Gurumurthy was a former driver of Nishchith’s father and knew the child. That is why he accompanied the abductors without raising an alarm on Wednesday evening, the police suspect. Nishchith was kidnapped while returning from his tuition class. The police suspect that someone known to the family was in constant touch with Gurumurthy and Gopikrishna after the abduction and kept them informed about the movement of the parents.
Based on this information, the kidnappers kept shifting from one location to another, thwarting efforts by police teams to get to them in time to save the boy.
The police are also baffled by Gurumurthy’s technological prowess. While calling up Nishchith’s mother only once, he used Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to hide his tracks. All communication with the parents thereafter was through WhatsApp messages.
“The criminals may have killed the child to prevent being identified and also may not have had any hideout to keep him. They seemed to have run out of options and may have killed him. In most cases, burning the body after killing is to hide the identity of the victim and get rid of vital evidence. The longer it takes to identify a body, the more time the criminals get to make a getaway. Professional kidnappers have gangsters as part of their network, with whose help they keep shifting their hostage from one undisclosed place to the other, making it a daunting task and long chase for the police. Because of their network they are able to sustain and even hike the demand for ransom,” a senior police official said.
In this case, the entire crime, from kidnapping, ransom call to the victim’s parents, and the murder happened in quick succession, as if the perpetrators were in a hurry and had started to panic towards the end.
“There is a high possibility of a conduit through which information on the hostage’s parents and their movements was being passed in real time to the perpetrators, and they seem to know exactly what was happening at the other end. In such cases, it is highly likely that someone is known to both sides,” the official said.
“The second important fact is that the amount of Rs 5 lakh for ransom suggests the desperation of the criminals and a small team. They may have resorted to kidnapping to get quick and easy money. It is also possible that someone either knows the family or was aware of the boy’s movements (from tuition to home), and may have hired criminals to commit the crime,” he added.