A youth from Haryana whose family is said to have paid Rs 40 lakh to send him to the US for a job was allegedly kidnapped and kept in Kolkata for a month. He was rescued from near the Kolkata airport on Saturday.
Bidhannagar police said they had learnt about 17 more youths from Haryana and Punjab who had allegedly been lured with the promise of a job abroad and held in Kolkata in an attempt to extort money from their families.
All 18 were rescued together from the same hideout, the police said.
Three men have been arrested for allegedly running the job-cum-extortion racket. A search is on for three others, officers said.
The three who have been arrested are Suresh Sinha, his brother Rakesh Prasad Sinha and Dhiraj Das. Officers said the trio were rounded up from near the airport.
The deputy commissioner (detective department) of the Bidhannagar police, Biswajit Ghosh, said officers at the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport police station had on September 16 received a complaint from a resident of Haryana alleging that his son had been missing since August 28 and that he was the last known to be in Kolkata.
“We received a complaint from Naresh Kumar, a resident of Haryana, that his son Rahul had been missing since August 28. According to the complaint, Rahul was promised a job in the US, for which he was brought to Kolkata via Panipat. The agency had asked for Rs 49 lakh, of which the family had paid Rs 40 lakh. But after coming to Kolkata, the family had lost touch with Rahul,” Ghosh said.
The police said Naresh Kumar came to Kolkata in pursuit of his son and met officers of the Bidhannagar police, but he had initially refused to lodge a complaint because he thought the complaint would have to be lodged in Haryana as he had paid Rs 40 lakh to the agency in that state.
“But we kept probing the trail and on our request, Naresh Kumar lodged a formal complaint with us through an e-mail,” Ghosh said.
The complaint mentioned that the people who were apparently running the job agency were now asking for more money from a phone number that appeared to be registered in the US. “It was found that the racketeers had used internet calls to bounce the server and make calls that appeared to have been made from the US.
The callers demanded money to release Rahul,” an officer said.
However, during the investigation, the police found that Rahul was not in the US but had been kept in a house near Eco Park in New Town.
Based on information from sources and electronic surveillance, the police zeroed in on Rahul’s location and arrested three men who were allegedly involved in the racket. They had shifted Rahul to a location near the Kolkata airport, said police.
