A 12-year-old girl phoned her father and told him she had been kidnapped and her captors are demanding only an i-Pad handset. The plot is not a new joke or part of a detective movie but is a real incident that took place in Abu Dhabi, where police had to intervene in full force. When he received that call from his daughter, the father was so worried but part of him was skeptic as the girl abruptly ended the call and turned her mobile phone off.
So he rushed to the police and told them about the presumed abduction and the weird ransom. Given their long experience, police were even more skeptic than the father. The first thing they tried to do was to track the source of the girl’s call. Their skepticism grew into suspicion when they found out the call came from a major shopping mall. A large police force fanned out through the mall searching for the girl after they were provided with her descriptions by her father. It did not take them long to find her.
“She was on her own and in a good mood and condition…her mobile phone was still switched off,” said Lt Colonel Saeed Al Amiri, director of the Capital Police station. “When we asked her about the abductors, she said she had planned all this so her father will buy her an I-Pad…she said she had asked him many times to buy her the handset but that he has always refused.” The Dubai-based Arabic language daily Albayan, which carried the report, did not identify the girl or specify the mall where she plotted her devious plan.
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