Article March 8, 2004 Issue

Calm restored after a kidnapping

By Poonam Likhi

One evening my brother Vivek called me with a desperate plea to pray with him. His female colleague Alka had been kidnapped earlier that day in South Delhi, India. She and my brother and another colleague were conducting a marketing survey for a resort company in a high-traffic area of the city. They were walking and had left a car parked some distance away.

Without warning, on a busy road, a car stopped, and a young man came out and started hitting and abusing my brother. There was no obvious explanation for his behavior. When Alka intervened to stop the attacker, his friends suddenly forced her into the car. My brother tried to stop the attacker, but he threatened Vivek with a gun and fled with Alka in the car.

Vivek was very concerned about his colleague's safety, but he noticed Alka and the young man had spoken together as if they knew each other. He later found out about a long-standing property dispute between Alka's and the young man's families, creating mutual animosity.

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