On March 16, shortly after 13-year-old Tushar, a Class 6 student, went missing from his house in Patna’s Kanhauli village, his father, Raj Kishore Pandit, received a ransom call on WhatsApp. The kidnapper wanted Pandit, a government schoolteacher, to pay up Rs 40 lakh for the safe return of his son. Three days later, police recovered the boy’s charred body from a secluded spot and arrested the alleged perpetrator—Mukesh Pandey, 28, who ran a coaching centre and private school in the same locality.
Police claim Pandey, confronted by private moneylenders from whom he had borrowed Rs 20 lakh, found an easy target in his former student Tushar, who unsuspectingly accompanied the accused only to be strangled to death, his body later burnt to hide evidence. Pandey then allegedly started sending…