Top Assam officer’s kidnapped son returns after five years

GUWAHATI, APRIL 1: One thousand eight hundred and forty-eight days seemed to be like eternity for P P Verma, special commissioner to Assam...

GUWAHATI, APRIL 1: One thousand eight hundred and forty-eight days seemed to be like eternity for P P Verma, special commissioner to Assam CM Prafulla Mahanta. But perseverance and what he calls his faith in the Goddess Kamakhya paid off. His only son Abhishek, abducted from here five years ago, has been finally located and brought back home — from farway Buxar in Bihar — ending one of the most protracted kidnapping cases in the country.

Abhishek was only eight when some unidentified persons kidnapped him from inside the Central School, Khanapara campus here on March 8, 1995.

Interestingly, while all efforts put in by the state police as well as the CBI over the past five years failed to locate the boy, it was finally an advertisement in several editions of The Indian Express on March 8, which played a key role in his rescue.

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Following the publication of the ad, Verma received a call from his friend in Patna and then rushed to Bihar. Abhishek, escorted by his father and two of his schoolmates, returned to Guwahati today via Calcutta. He was directly taken to the Kamakhya temple from the airport from where he went home. A large number of Central School students, relatives, family friends, some colleagues of Verma and police officers turned up at the airport to welcome the boy home.

Although Abhishek wasn’t allowed to speak to the press, his father said that it was on Thursday that he got a telephone call from some persons in Patna that they had located a boy resembling Abhishek whose photograph had appeared in The Indian Express advertisement. The boy, who is now 13years old, was seen at a house in village Palwa in Buxar district of Bihar.

Verma said that his son was in a state of shock and trauma and was unable to recall the events after his abduction. Abhishek was living in a farmer’s house in village Palwa for the past two-and-a-half years.

Earlier, the abductors had kept him in various places in Assam, Bengal and in a number of villages bordering Nepal in Bihar. The CBI was asked to take charge of the case after the Assam Police failed to get any clue way back in 1996. Verma was then the state transport commissioner.

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Interestingly, Shiw Shambhu Ojha, a former minister of the erstwhile Congress government in the state, was considered a prime suspect in the abduction, and the CBI had interrogated him several times, once even putting him through the lie-detector. Ojha has since quit the Congress party and joined BJP.

Within two months of taking over the case, the CBI announced a cash reward of Rs 2 lakh to anyone giving information about the boy but nothing moved. There was also speculation that a criminal-politician nexus was behind the abduction especially in view of the well-known fact that Verma, as transport commissioner, was not getting along with Ojha who was then the transport minister.

The involvement of the ULFA, too, was suspected leading the police to raid several dens of the militant group in the state but those efforts did not lead to any vital clue. Several ULFA members were arrested and interrogated prompting ULFA commander Paresh Barua to issue a statement that his boys were not involved.