DHANGADI, JANUARY 13
A teacher in Baitadi posted a status on his Facebook page last Friday stating that he had fallen into kidnappers' clutches. In his post, teacher Harish Awasthi, 23, of Kalalbase in Surnaya Rural Municipality, had alleged that two persons of his own village had abducted him by using some operatives of the Netra Bikram Chand-led CPN party.
Awasthi, a teacher at a local school in Kalalbase, had also informed through the post that he was kept in a toilet on the banks of the Rapti River in Banke after being abducted on January 6.
As the post instantly went viral on Facebook, a large number of users asked police to rescue the teacher. Baitadi police informed the police in Banke about the abduction.
Banke Police rescued the man from the banks of the Rapti River. The man was then sent to Baitadi the same evening.
The rescue and the ensuing investigation didn't only reveal that the professed abduction was a drama, but also exposed that the abductee was in fact a murderer who had faked an abduction story to escape arrest.
The murder was exposed when Awasthi, upon being interrogated by police about his knowledge of the man missing from his village for the past one month, said he had actually murdered him.
According to a police officer of Baitadi, the teacher conceded while recording his statement with the police that he had murdered Dambardatta Awasthi and faked his own abduction.
Interestingly, one of the persons blamed for the abduction was none other than the murdered person's brother.
"As a person was missing for long from the village, we had asked him about the murder, and he ended up speaking up about the murder and his involvement in it," said the police officer. Dambardatta Awasthi had been missing for the past one month.
A version of this article appears in the print on January 14, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
