NEW DELHI: Rudra had already passed out by the time police burst into the flat on Friday afternoon, threw open the bathroom door and found him slumped on the floor, bound and gagged. For almost 24 hours, the three-year-old had been held without food and water. Doctors who later attended on him said he could have died as he was “97% dehydrated”.After a traumatic night, Rudra’s family and police heaved a sigh of relief as their race against time and a wily mind was over. The culprit was none other than the family’s 22-year-old tenant Nisha , who is studying BCom at Delhi University. Her partner in crime was an even more unlikely suspect, her 16-year-old brother Tarun Nisha and Tarun kidnapped Rudra from outside his house in south Delhi’s Ghitorni village , on Thursday afternoon, but they had planned it out over months. The flat where they held Rudra was rented several months ago. The WhatsApp account Nisha used to demand ransom was not her own, but cloned. She had even made a fake Facebook account in the name of ‘JD’ to pin the blame.The tech savvy duo kept police guessing for the greater part of Thursday. As the cops tried to trace the caller’s internet (IP) address, Nisha coolly demanded Rs 5 crore in ransom from Rudra’s father, Anil Gupta, who owns a few houses and grocery shops in Ghitorni.When Gupta showed the WhatsApp message for ransom at the Vasant Kunj (south) police station on Thursday evening, they traced it to an old rickshaw puller in Ghitorni village who also recharges mobile phones at his shack. While they were questioning him, Nisha made a WhatsApp call to Gupta to tell him where to bring the money.Gupta negotiated with Nisha through the night and beat down the demand to Rs 2 crore, meanwhile police kept trying to pin down her location. “She made the call using a mobile hotspot connected to several other phones, due to which the IP address kept changing. It became extremely difficult for us to track,” Devender Arya, DCP southwest, told TOI.To crack the case quickly, the cops decided to snare Nisha with the ransom. On Friday afternoon, Gupta left the money at the agreed location in a bag that had a tracker inside. When Nisha took the bag away, plainclothesmen, who had hung around the place, quickly located her and made her take them to Rudra.During questioning, Nisha first played innocent, telling police ‘JD’ had planned the kidnapping. But she confessed after police found out that the JD Facebook profile was fake. She told police she took the rickshaw puller’s mobile number in August, and her brother cloned it using an app.As to their motive, Nisha said they were angry because Rudra’s grandfather had once scolded Tarun over a trifle. However, they had their eye on the Gupta family’s wealth as well.R P Updhyay, special commissioner (law and order), said two police teams had worked on the case. “A team led by ACP Ramesh Kumar and SHO Sanjeev Kumar was formed to track down kidnappers. A second team was tasked to track down the child.”Thanking police for their efforts to solve the case, Gupta said, “Our son would not have been alive but for the swift action by Delhi Police . We were afraid he might be killed.”(All names have been changed to protect the identities of the victim family and the accused minor.)