Sixty-eight-year-old retired engineer Yusuf Kunju sat patiently outside a Tis Hazari courtroom from 9 am, waiting for a glimpse of his 31-year-old son, Shaji Yusuf, a software engineer with Intel in Bangalore.

Yusuf was picked up by the Delhi Police’s Special Cell for helping his friend “abduct” a 30-year-old married doctor and for trying to “extort money from her family.”

His friend, Mohammad Yaseen, an engineer with IBM was arrested from Bangalore. Yusuf was picked up when he came to Delhi to inquire about his friend.

This, however, is not just any other case of abduction. The doctor, Madhumita Mishra, was working at Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital in Delhi. Mishra met Mohammed Yaseen,a software engineer with IBM on Orkut, the social networking website, three months ago.

Mishra’s husband Subijay Sinha was working in Kolkata and she was staying with her brother in Noida.

Mishra and Yaseen started exchanging e-mails on spirituality and Islam. The police say they exchanged about 600 mails. Mishra left her Noida home in the last week of August and started living at Ramanujan Guest House, Saraswati Road in Karol Bagh.

On September 3, she boarded a flight to Bangalore to meet Yaseen.

On September 7, her husband Sinha registered a complaint with the Karol Bagh police claiming that she was missing. Four days later, he filed a complaint that said: “I came to know that my wife was talking to one Yaseen in Bangalore. I fear that she might be abducted by him and confined by some fundamentalist group.”

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