\\\'We would\\\'ve been in danger if Jihad was not found\\\'

Jihad, the child trapped in a pipe, kept responding for six hours since the launch of the rescue operation by Fire Service and Civil Defence men on Friday afternoon, witnesses said. The four-year-old boy had spoken several times and even held the rope four times. But those who gave these information and spoke about him on Friday night panicked at one stage of the rescue operation as they had been bombarded with questions. Jihad, son of Nasiruddin Fakir, a resident of Shahjahan Railway Colony in Dhaka, slipped into a 600 feet abandoned water pipe at a pump house of Bangladesh Railway around 4pm on Friday. One of the witnesses, railway official Jahid Mia, said ‘At first I asked Jihad – ‘uncle, are you alright?’ he answered ‘yes’. I spoke with him several times until 10pm on Saturday,’ he said. Driver Mohammad Sohel, the other witness, also gave similar account of the event while sharing his experience standing beside the 14-inch-diameter pipe on Saturday afternoon, an hour after Jihad had been pulled out by locals in an unconscious state. ‘The two of us would have been in danger if the body was not found. Several detectives and people from the media started looking for us after it was reported early in the morning that the news of the boy being trapped in the pipe was nothing but a rumour,’ Sohel said. Recalling the first hours of the rescue operation, railway official Jahid said, ‘We dropped a thin nylon rope and asked him whether he got the rope, he answered ‘No’. Then we had pulled the rope and dropped it again with a torch and asked if he got the light, he answered ‘yes’. He had also admitted that he got the rope,’ Jahid said. ‘Then we asked him to hold the torch upwards. But the rope got lighter after pulling up around 10 feet,’ he said. ‘Afterwards, we dropped a thick rope with a torch and he had held it but released after some time,’ he said, according to bdnews24.com.