Shenoy Nagar 2019 kidnap case: Maid awarded life-term

CHENNAI: Less than a month into the job as a stay-at-home help, a 24-year-old woman and her accomplice kidnapped the three-year-old child of her employer and demanded Rs 60 lakh ransom from the parents — a doctor and an engineer — in July 2019.

Their plans were busted by the city police, who rescued the LKG kid from an East Coast Road resort within eight hours and arrested the duo. Five years on, a city court finally found them guilty of kidnapping for ransom and sentenced the accused to life imprisonment on Wednesday.

M Ambika had approached her employers through the online classifieds site OLX and joined them in their house in Shenoy Nagar in the last week of June 2019.

On July 18, 2019, the child’s mother, a doctor, saw her daughter, an LKG student, getting dropped off outside the home by the school van and noticed Ambika was going to fetch the child. The mother went inside her room to prepare herself to leave for duty and came out to notice that her daughter and the maid were not at home.

As she went around in search of them, she received a phone call from her husband, an engineer who told her that a man called him demanding a ransom of Rs 60 lakh to return the child and the maid. The demand eventually was reduced to Rs 30 lakh.

The couple filed a police complaint with the Aminjikarai police, and special teams chased various leads, including phone dump analysis, first apprehended Ambika’s accomplice at Sothupakkam near Red Hills during a vehicle check.

A police team there secured the accomplice, Kaleemullah Sait, based on the description of the escape vehicle — a red Chevrolet Beat — sent across police stations

On enquiry, Kaleemullah coughed up that Ambika and the child were at a resort on East Coast Road where he had booked a room in his name. Another police team rushed to the resort, rescued the child and secured Ambika. The child was reunited with her parents past midnight.

During the trial, Ambika told the court that she took the child to the beach on the instructions of her employer and her counsel also floated other theories, but the Mahila court Judge J Sreedevi cited the examination of the oral and documentary evidence produced by the prosecution and held that there are materials found to prove the complicity of the accused.

“In short, this court holds that the prosecution has proved the guilt of the accused under Sections 364A r/w 34 of IPC (kidnapping for ransom) beyond all reasonable doubt,” the court held and sentenced them to life imprisonment.

Ironically, at the time of sentencing, the main accused, Mohammed Kaleemullah Sait (35), pleaded with the court for a lesser sentence, citing his two-year-old child.