Thane horror: 13-year-old kidnapped, hacked to death after parents go to cops

Four persons have been arrested in Thane district for allegedly kidnapping and then chopping a 13-year-old boy into multiple pieces when they found out that the parents of the child had approached the police. On 17 April, 13-year-old Rohan Gucchali went missing from his home in the Kalyan area of Thane and his parents had filed a complaint with the local police. A day later, the boy’s jeweller father Uttambhai Gucchali received a call seeking a a ransom of Rs 50 lakhs for his son’s release and was even warned against going to the police. The parents, however, informed the police about the ransom call.

The same week the police found chopped off legs of a human body at the Givindwadi flower market and the ossification test revealed that the body parts belonged to a male aged around 12. However, there was no connection made with the case at the time. The parents continued to receive ransom calls at the time and when Rohan’s mother asked to speak with him, the call was cut by the kidnappers,
The police managed to piece together evidence and also received a tip-off to finally arrest electrician Ishtiyaq Sayyed Shaikh, who was employed with the boy’s father, and three alleged accomplices. According to a Times of India report, Shaikh had studied the movements of the family and on 17 April had taken the boy from his home on a motorcycle claiming that his father had summoned him. Shaikh instead first took him to a store and then with four others took him away in a vehicle and kept him in confinement in his brother-in-law’s flat. However, when Shaikh learnt of the boy’s parents calling the police, he and his accomplices killed Rohan, then reportedly used an electric saw to chop the body into pieces and threw away the body parts at different locations. The police reportedly found CCTV footage of Rohan being taken away on the motorcycle by Shaikh and questioned him. While the family hasn’t spoken in public about the incident, a neighbour has alleged that despite giving the police evidence like CCTV footage and an eyewitness they had taken the case too lightly. “I just have to say that if the police had done their duty properly and not taken everything so lightly, then the child could have been saved today,” the neighbour was quoted as saying in an NDTV report. The police has said that it had done everything that it could to trace the boy.