\\\'Spurred on by onlookers to rescue Jihad\\\'

None saw it coming when the search for child ‘Jihad’ reached a dead end. But several youths, strangers to each other, gave the word unexpected a whole new meaning on Dec 27 (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 several hundred feet pipe of the deep tube-well. 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 a media 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 four-year-old boy fell down the 14-inch-diameter 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 said: ‘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 10 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,’ according to bdnews24.com.