Almost five days after the abduction case of Snapdeal Executive Dipti Sarna, Ghaziabad Police on Monday arrested five accused and claimed to have searched their other accomplices. Police revealed that the main accused in the case said the plot was based on Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan’s movie Darr. Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Dharmendra Singh, who had earlier indicated possible contradictions in the woman’s version on the day she was traced, gave a clean chit to her, saying her version was right.
According to the district police chief, the prime accused has as many as 30 cases registered against him and he escaped from police custody in Sonepat during a court hearing in June 2014, and around seven months later he saw the girl with a male friend at Rajiv Chowk Metro station and fell in love with her, the official said.
“The accused was highly inspired by Bollywood movie Darr, in which Shah Rukh Khan’s character gets obsessed with a woman. He read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf during the time he spent in jail and was inspired by the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun and also took inspiration from the life and struggle of Genghis Khan,” the official said.
Police claimed that the accused started tracking Sarna’s movements and soon bought two auto-rickshaws to execute his plans of abducting her. He tried to do so several times but failed as the girl, who used to get off the Metro at Vaishali station, always preferred taking shared autos in which a few women were already seated, Singh said.
On February 10, he along with his associates, managed to puncture the auto-rickshaw in which Sarna and several others were travelling and intercepted the vehicle with his own auto, in which three of the co-accused were present, and convinced the driver of the punctured vehicle to shift the passengers, of which three were women (including the victim), to his vehicle, the SSP said. There were two vacant seats in the auto-rickshaw, and it was Sarna and another woman who decided to board it as they were in a rush to reach their destinations. During the journey, the accused men present in the auto, pulled out a knife and threatened the other woman to step out of the vehicle. Once she obliged, they blindfolded Sarna, pointed a gun at her and headed towards an undisclosed location, he said.
On their way, the auto-rickshaw in which she was being taken broke down. Meanwhile, the prime accused was following her in a car. At the point where the auto-rickshaw broke down, the accused men dumped her mobile phone (which the police have failed to recover) and backpack behind an under-construction bungalow.
“The accused is a psychopath, for which the motive behind the crime could not be cracked. He had not disclosed about his motive even to any of the co-accused. To some of them he said that the woman they were to abduct was a hawala operator and she could fetch them crores and to others who were roped in to the plan he said that he needed men to thrash a person,” the senior official said.
Police revealed that from the spot of the auto breakdown, the prime accused made her sit in his car and headed towards his native village. On the way, his vehicle ran out of gas for which he borrowed his cousin’s car and continued the journey towards a village in Baghpat. There they held the girl captive for a night, during which the prime accused did his best to convince her that he did not want to hurt her and it were his co-accused who had actually abducted her. He played the ‘hero’ and, meanwhile, kept telling Sarna that it was her male friend (with whom he often used to see Sarna) who had ulterior motives and wanted to kill Sarna’s relatives, the senior official said. The next morning, the prime accused took her to a railway station and made her sit on a train heading towards Delhi.