Cooch Behar, Dec. 22: Four persons who tried to kidnap a businessman from Khagrabari yesterday were arrested from Takagachh late last night.

Police sources said yesterday Palash Sarkar, a medicine shop owner in Motiarkuti, around 25km from here, was returning from Siliguri in a hired car with his neighbour when he got a call from Jagadish Das, one of the kidnappers who was known to Sarkar, around 9pm. Jagadish asked him to go to Khagrabari to meet him.

"The kidnappers took Sarkar and (his neighbour) Jiwan Barman to Takagachh from Khagrabari. Jagadish asked Sarkar to hand over whatever money he had and beat him up after he refused to part with cash," a police source said.

"Yesterday around 7pm, Sarkar had spoken to his wife Shiuli over the mobilephone. After half-an-hour, Shiuli received a call from an unknown number and the caller said her husband had been abducted. The caller demanded Rs 10 lakh as ransom and later brought down the amount to Rs 2 lakh. They asked her to meet them with the money but kept changing the venue. First they asked her to meet them at Station Chowpathy here, then they asked her to go to Khagrabari and later to Mahisbathan." the source said

"Shiuli got confused and she went Kotwali police station. The woman called the abductors from the police station while we tracked the mobile location. We traced the calls to Takagachh. We went there and arrested the abductors around 2am," the source added.

The arrested persons, Jagadish Das, Haren Das, Samir das and Madan Sarkar are residents of Takagachh, 7km from here.

Cooch Behar police superintendent Anoop Jaiswal said: "The four are being interrogated."

A police source said the arrested persons were produced in the chief judicial magistrate's court here today. "They have been were charged under Section 364A (kidnapping for ransom) and remanded in police custody for six days," he said.