A kindergarten student of Loyola School in Jamshedpur was whisked away from the camera-equipped campus gate on Tuesday afternoon and found abandoned near the Beldih Lake six hours later in a grim rerun of a similar abduction attempt at the city's DBMS English School around two months ago.

The young, tribal woman, "who had looked like a relative" to gatekeepers and had lured the six-year-old girl with the promise of an ice cream before making Rs 4-lakh ransom calls to her not-so-affluent parents, surrendered in the small hours of Wednesday after police tracked phone numbers, reached her house and detained her father.

The 20-year-old has been identified as Jyoti Barla, a former student of Loyola and resident of New Sitaramdera. Her boyfriend and accomplice, Mohammed Aurangzeb, is absconding.

Addressing reporters on Wednesday, East Singhbhum SSP Anoop T. Mathew said Bistupur police received the kidnap complaint from the child's parents - father a crane operator at Tata Motors and mother a clerk at Bank of Baroda's Golmuri branch - around 3pm, an hour and a half after upper kindergarten classes got over at Loyola.

"Between 3pm and 8pm, the family received 11 calls from as many as four mobile phone numbers. Most of the time, the caller was a woman; a couple of times, a man. The callers threatened to kill the child if the ransom was not paid," said the senior officer.

The couple was asked to leave the bag of cash on the handle of a bike near the Tata zoo gate at 8pm. "The life of a child was involved and thus, we maintained utmost secrecy. While our technical cell was pressed into service to track the calls, we sent the father with a bag containing Rs 1 lakh instead of Rs 4 lakh to the rendezvous point. Plainclothes policemen had surrounded the Jubilee Park area beforehand," Mathew said.

In the meantime, police received information about a little girl, matching the missing child's description, standing with a scooter-borne woman near Beldih Lake in Dhatkidih. "We rushed another team there. The woman somehow got an inkling and ran away leaving the child alone. We rescued her around 8pm," he said.

The six-year-old safely home, police mounted efforts to nab her kidnappers. Tracking the number 9334527248, which was used to make the maximum number of calls, they reached Jyoti's residence. "She was not at home. We picked up her father late in the night. She surrendered around 2am (on Wednesday)," the SSP said.

While police suspect Jyoti to be a member of a professional abduction gang, the woman has maintained that no one else apart from her boyfriend was involved in the crime. Jyoti has also claimed that they are amateurs and had no idea whether parents of the girl were rich enough to pay the hefty ransom.

Mother of the girl said had their auto-rickshaw driver not been late, her child would have been spared the ordeal. "Kindergarten classes got over at 1.30pm and my daughter was waiting for the auto we have fixed for her, but it didn't come. The auto driver called me at 2.20pm to say my girl was missing. School sources said she had left with a woman on a scooter around 2.10pm," the mother said, adding that soon thereafter they got the first ransom call. "We even heard my child's distressed voice over phone."

Loyola School principal Father Sebastian Puthenpura said the campus was equipped with 32 surveillance cameras. "One of the feeds show a woman on a scooter, her face covered with a scarf, talk to the child at the gate. We recently introduced the system of not letting children go out unless parents or pool car drivers come calling. This woman looked like a relative and hence, the gatekeepers were fooled," he conceded.

On June 15, a Class IV girl of DBMS English School in Kadma had similarly disappeared from near campus and found in a dishevelled state at Tatanagar later that day. Police investigations revealed that two youths had kidnapped her and were planning to traffic her, but the bid was foiled by a couple who recognised her uniform and alerted station authorities.

What steps must be taken to curb campus kidnappings? Tell ttkhand@abpmail.com