JOIN USA visually challenged boy was gagged and robbed of his tablet by four persons who offered him a lift in a car in south Delhi. The men then dumped him at a deserted stretch of road after emptying his pocket of cash.
To scare the 16-year-old victim into believing that they would carry out their threat of killing him if he did not part with the Samsung Galaxy tablet, they made him feel two objects with “sharp edges”.
Having been dumped at an isolated spot, victim Anand Kumar Singh felt “lost” and cried for sometime before getting back to his feet to return to a hostel for the blind located on Panchkuian Road.
He was finally helped onto a bus by a passer-by who saw him feeling the road divider in a bid to get to safety.
The victim called police after getting back to his hostel. Police at Lajpat Nagar have registered a case, but none of the culprits, that include a woman, have been identified yet.
Anand, a class 7 student at the Blind School on Panchkuian Road, had on Sunday visited his friend Umesh Mandal who is enrolled at another school for the visually challenged in Lajpat Nagar. The incident took place while Anand was returning to his own hostel later that afternoon.
“I was waiting at Gupta Market bus stand for a bus to Andrews Ganj from where I would take a connecting bus to Panchuian Road. But a car pulled over by my side and one of its occupants offered to give me a ride till Andrews Ganj. People generally offer help on noticing that I am blind. I had no reason to suspect them,” Anand, a native of Bhagalpur in Bihar, told Deccan Herald. He will never trust and accept help from strangers anymore, he added.
Minutes after the car began moving, a man asked him to part with his tablet.
“Yeh tab mera ho gaya ab (this tablet is mine now),” the man told him. When the victim protested, one of them gagged him with a cloth.
“They threatened that either I part with the tablet or my life. To prove that they were armed, they made me touch two objects that had sharp edges,” the boy alleged.
Unable to speak, he nodded his head to convey that they could have his tablet.
They then dumped him at an unknown location after cleaning him of Rs 240 in cash.
He sat down by the road and cried for a while before attempting to cross the road.
He managed to walk across one side of the road safely, but the other road was too busy.
“To stay off the speeding vehicles, I walked along the road divider for some distance before a person offered help,” he said. Anand had bought the tablet for Rs 12,400 only three months ago.
“The device had the talkback facility which enabled me to browse the internet. I don’t know when I will be able to afford another tablet or phone with the same facility,” he said.