Kidnapper girl gets bail for`final exams’

The 18-year-old girl’s alleged offence has stunned Pune police, especially since the girl comes from a very well-to-do background. More shocking is their revelation that the kidnapping was preceded by a series of car thefts committed by Vidya. Police investigation has also revealed that the girl was involved in an attempt at house-breaking in Kothrud area.

When questioned about the kidnapping, Vidya attributed the act to her need for money to buy a motorbike. Shesaid her father, a timber merchant, had refused to buy her a bike. Therefore, she had to hatch a plan to get easy money. She telephoned Vaishnavi’s parents to inform them she had kidnapped their daughter, and asked them to come with a ransom of Rs 50,000 near Mehendale garage. When Ganesh Sose came to give the amount, she told him her brother had been kidnapped and she needed the money to pay the ransom. She took the money and later brought back Vaishnavi in a rickshaw, as promised.

After the entire drama got over in three hours, the Sose couple, unable to digest Vidya’s sob story, complained to the police. Police asked the six-year-old about the place where she had been kept by Vidya. The locked residential flat used by the accused and a stolen moped in the building pointed an accusing finger at a college girl. To their utter surprise, they found the accused Vidya was the same person arrested in a car theft a month ago. Minutes after Vidya was taken into custody, she confessed she had kidnapped Vaishnaviand threatened her parents. Surprisingly, Vidya’s parents didn’t know she had buried Rs 50,000 in their house, until the police retrieved the ransom amount.

Interestingly, Vidya’s advocate Uday Warunjikar also finds it “difficult to believe” she kidnapped the six-year-old girl and managed to get a ransom single-handedly. He said the police must now see whether the girl has been misled by unknown factors.

Warunjikar also stressed the need for Vidya’s medical test. “The criminal trial will prove whether Vidya actually did all the things she’s accused of doing. But that’s not the solution. One has to conduct a blood test to detect any possible imbalance. We have to find out if the origin of criminal tendencies lies in social status, influence of films or something else. Vidya can prove a test case for future investigation,” he said.

Vidya’s antics come close on the heels of similar car thefts committed by another college girl in Pune.