How Mehsana Police ensured ransomless release of Gujaratis kidnapped in Ethiopia

When cousins Mamta (30), Rutvik (23), and Mayuri (27) reached Langhnaj in Gujarat’s Mehsana district on October 1, their first stop, even before they went home, was the local police station.

This was a procedural requirement – but the cousins also wanted to meet the officers whose “remarkable negotiating skills” over phone had extricated them from the clutches of a gang of abductors in Ethiopia.

The cousins, all between the ages of 23 and 30 from a farming family in Vadasma village in North Gujarat, had hoped to travel to the United States. However, given the severe restrictions on migration by the Trump administration, they had allegedly chosen to take an illegal, circuitous “dunki” route.

They never made it.

The cousins were allegedly waylaid in Ethiopia, in eastern Africa, not far from the theatre of hostilities between the US and Iran, abducted, and held hostage for a week, sources in the Mehsana Police said.

When they were finally able to board Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 640 to Mumbai from Addis Ababa on September 30 evening, all that the cousins had with them were their passports – everything else had allegedly been kept by their abductors. The cousins told the police that the abductors had, however, booked the tickets for the flight back and released them without extracting a ransom.

For this unexpected turn of events, the cousins have Inspector A M Gehlot to thank – and his long negotiations with the suspected leader of the kidnappers, a man who police sources said spoke in Hindi and identified himself as “Baba Khan”.

This, in essence, is the story of an alleged attempt at illegal entry into the US by two women and a man, their abduction and, ultimately, their extraordinary escape back to India, according to Mehsana Police and Inspector Gehlot.

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Mehsana Superintendent of Police Himanshu Solanki and Collector S K Prajapati were not available for comment. Sources in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) told The Indian Express that three Indian nationals had been kidnapped in Ethiopia, and rescued by the local authorities there.

“They were rescued by Ethiopian authorities in Addis Ababa. Our Embassy in Addis Ababa was constantly in touch with the local authorities on this matter. Indian law enforcement authorities also contributed to the efforts. The three Indian nationals returned home on October 1,” MEA sources said.

Mehsana district is known for its residents’ desire to migrate to the United States, with locked homes across several villages in this region bearing testimony to this trend. Vadasma lies about halfway between Gandhinagar and Mehsana cities, and about 4.5 km from Langhnaj, which is on the main road.

On September 29, members of the cousins’ family filed a missing persons’ report at Langhnaj police station, saying they had not heard from the three since their last call on September 22.

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The cousins had allegedly told their relatives that they were in Canada. “They told their families that they would now contact them from the US. But then they went incommunicado,” Inspector Gehlot said.

In fact, the cousins were allegedly already in the custody of Baba Khan at the time, and had been coerced to lie to their families and not disclose that they had been abducted and were in Ethiopia.

According to police sources, the three had left India on different flights from Jaipur and Delhi on September 21, and reached the Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa via the Middle East. Thereafter, investigations revealed, the “agent” who had booked their tickets abducted them, stole their belongings, and demanded a ransom of Rs 1 crore (USD 1,05,000) for their release.

The cousins’ extended family and police were alerted about the abduction by a youth from Kadi town in Mehsana, identified as Vansh, police sources said. This youth had returned home after being kidnapped in Ethiopia, and after having allegedly paid a ransom of Rs 40 lakh, the sources said.

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Officers from the Langhnaj police station immediately persuaded the families of the three cousins to file missing persons’ complaints. By then, Baba Khan too had reached out to a “contact” in Dangarva village, whom police sources identified as Aditya Panchal.

This person directed the cousins’ family to an agent from Vadodara, identified as Bhargav Patel. But police found that Patel had already gone underground.

Information on the case was shared with the Local Intelligence Branch (LIB) of Mehsana Police, the Gujarat Police headquarters at Gandhinagar, and the MEA in New Delhi, the sources said. They said that Langhnaj police decided to take Aditya Panchal into confidence, and get him to engage with the alleged abductor in their presence.

“Panchal, a member of the cousins’ family, and two police personnel spoke to Baba Khan continuously over several calls. They tried to convince Baba Khan that the middle-class family was engaged in farming, and couldn’t afford to pay the huge ransom, especially as they had already paid Rs 60 lakh to the network – at Rs 20 lakh per person – to ferry them to the US,” Inspector Gehlot said.

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“Following the negotiations, the kidnappers brought their demand down to Rs 15 lakh. They said this was the lowest they were willing to go, at Rs 5 lakh per person,” Gehlot said.

By then, investigators had begun to suspect that ‘Baba Khan’ was only an alias. The man on the other end would speak on WhatsApp voice calls, and would never agree to come on video, which might offer police clues as to his identity, sources said.

“At one point, on September 30, the family representative told Baba Khan that they could not afford to pay him even Rs 5 lakh, let alone the Rs 15 lakh that he was demanding,” Gehlot said.

This was followed by some tense moments. The abductor seemed very angry, and he “swore and hung up”, police sources said.

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But later that day, the family got a video call from an unknown number. “When they answered, they saw Mamta, Rutvik, and Mayuri on the screen. The cousins told them they had borrowed someone’s phone to make the call. They said that the abductors had dropped them 2 km from the airport and had booked their tickets back to India,” the sources said.

The three landed in Mumbai around 2 am on October 1, and headed to Gujarat.

The cousins told police that in Addis Ababa, they were taken to an isolated residence, tied and blindfolded. Rutvik was beaten but “there was no mistreatment with the two women”, Gehlot said.

The three also told police that they did not know Vansh, the youth whose tip-off allegedly helped police get on their trail.

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According to sources, the family had decided to send the cousins via the ‘dunki’ route after the US government rejected Mamta’s visa application. “Since they were sending Mamta, they thought that the two younger cousins could also start new lives in the US, and decided to send all the three together,” Inspector Gehlot said.

Police are now trying to trace Bhargav Patel, the alleged travel agent who is suspected to be part of Baba Khan’s network.