On Wednesday, five persons were arrested for allegedly kidnapping a 7-year-old boy for ransom in Maharashtra's Gondia district, the police said. The boy, who was kidnapped on July 3, was found abandoned the very next day and reunited with his parents.

The five accused have been identified as Vaibhav Prakash Wasnik (23), Shekhar Dulichand Shende

(23), both residents of Ghategaon in Sadak Arjun tehsil; Pravin Kailash Patil (22), Rahul Namaji Gavad (19) and Saurabh Balkrishna Gaidhani (19), all residents of Deori, were arrested from Nagpur on Tuesday.

All the five accused were arrested in a joint operation led by the Local Crime Branch (LCB) team and Duggipaar police. During the interrogation, all the five arrested accused have confessed to involvement in the crime, said Vinita Sahu, Superintendent of Police, Gondia.

The schoolboy, a resident of Ghategaon, was kidnapped from outside the Zilla Parishad school where he studied on July 3 by two men who came on a scooter. Sahu said she formed five teams of LCB for investigation besides increasing vigil on the roads leading out of the district.

The kidnappers, who were probably in panic, abandoned the schoolboy trussed up in a gunny sack near Shenda Putali village in Deori tehsil the next day. He was found and reunited with his parents. In order to find the kidnappers, the LCB and cyber cell of the police conducted investigations. The investigators got some vital clues after speaking to the boy and succeeded in nabbing the accused from various places in Nagpur, the

SP said.

The accused had kidnapped the boy with the intention of extorting ransom from his parents, Sahu said. All the five accused were unemployed young men and none of them had any criminal record, she said. Gavad is the son of a policeman.

In a similar incident, a group of men in Army uniform allegedly kidnapped four persons travelling in a car in Kolkata and demanded a ransom of Rs 200 crore from them. The kidnappers released the victims and fled after one of their gang members was arrested by the police as he came to the victims' office to collect the money, the police said.

The incident of kidnapping took place at around noon near Jhinjhirabazar in south 24 Parganas district's Batanagar.

Deputy Commissioner of Kolkata Police (south) Miraz Khalid said, "About nine persons, dressed in Army uniforms, came in two cars and intercepted the vehicle of one Arindam Dhar and three of his office staff near Jhinjhirabazar and kidnapped them. They demanded a ransom of Rs 200 crore and opened fire at the victims when they refused to pay up."

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