Noone saw it coming when the search for the four-year-old 'Jihad' reached a dead end.

 

But several youths, strangers to each other, gave the word unexpected a whole new meaning last Saturday.

The expression on the face of the onlookers egged them on, they said, reinforcing their belief that the boy was indeed trapped down the pipe of the deep tubewell.

By then, the fire service had failed to catch him on camera and called off the rescue operation.

Speculations were swirling that it might be a hoax as government officials declared that the boy was not there.

Three of the youths -- Shafiqul Islam Faruq, Shah Muhammad Abdullah Al-Moon and Sujon Das Rahul – on Monday came to the bdnews24.com office to describe last Saturday’s rescue operations.

Faruq, who financed and led the drive, is a businessman while Moon, a diploma engineer, is working for a private firm and Rahul is studying at a private polytechnic institute.

They said they were not trained rescuers and that they had rushed to the scene only to see the boy saved.

Fire Service and Civil Defence had shelved its rescue operations on Saturday afternoon, around 23 hours after the boy fell down the pipe, failing to trace him there.

But that could not dissuade the youths and they pulled Jihad’s body out within half an hour with their ingenuity and technology.

Faruq told bdnews24.com: “We’ had been with the (fire service) rescue team since (Thursday) night. We planned to make an iron cage seeing their rescue method.”

Another youth ‘Anwar’ came forward to help by giving his camera, which was fixed with the cage. The device was named ‘mechanical capsule’.

Faruq said: “The cage was slowly lowered into the pipe. After sliding down around 100 feet it got stuck into something. But our plan was to send it further down.”

“Later, we pulled the cage around ten feet up and then dropped it again. This time, it started going down fast. We started releasing the rope slowly.”

He said the cage was stuck again at the spot where Jihad’s body was found.

At one stage, the camera captured the boy’s image, spurring the private rescuers on.

“I got emotional seeing the face of Jihad 250 feet down the pipe. I had tears in my eyes. We could see on the camera that the head of the boy was upward and an arm was on his forehead.

"I cried out seeing him. Later police and fire service people asked me to be quiet.”

The rescuers then pulled the body up.

Faruq said: “Water was traced 235-240 feet down the hole. Jihad was found 5-7 feet down from there.”

Moon said: “We went ahead with the conviction that I am a human being and I too have intelligence. The entire operation took around 30 minutes.”

He said after retrieving the boy they first thought he was alive. “Some local people took him from us before we knew anything. We then kept running with them.”

Rahul, however, gave some credit to the fire service personnel for extending help to them.

“Many of them stood by us when we were conducting the operation. We used their crane,” he said.

The youths said they were unknown to each other before the operations.

Jihad fell into the hole adjacent to a playground at the Shahjahanpur Railway Colony on Friday afternoon when he was playing with friends.

The 14-inch wide pipe, covered only with an empty jute sack, was just wide enough to fit the boy and too narrow for an adult to pass through.