In a high-voltage hostage drama that lasted for nearly two hours inside an audition-studio in Mumbai, the police on Thursday rescued 19 persons, including 17 children, after shooting down a young man who threatened to harm them.
The suspect, identified as Rohit Arya, suffered bullet wounds during a firing. The police fired at Arya after he fired at them using an air gun. The police rushed Arya to a nearby hospital, where he was declared dead on admission.
The investigations have revealed that Arya had called the children — aged between 8 and 14 years — to the RA Studio at the Mahaveer Classic building in Powai on pretext of auditions for a web series.
Soon after that, Arya held them hostage.
The hostage drama unfolded when teams of Quick Reaction Team, Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad, Mumbai Fire Brigade and special units like Force One arrived on the scene, after the Powai police received a distress call at around 1.45pm.
Arya also released a video, in which he said, “I am Rohit Arya and instead of dying by suicide, I have made a plan and I am holding some children hostage here. I am not a terrorist, nor do I demand a lot of money, and I certainly don’t want anything immoral. I don’t have many demands; I have very simple demands, moral demands, ethical demands, and a few questions… I want to talk to some people, ask them questions. But I want these answers. I don’t want anything else.”
“I want simple conversations, and that’s why I’ve taken these children hostage. I’ve held them hostage as part of a plan. If I live, I’ll do it; if I die, someone else will, but it will definitely happen because the slightest wrong move from you will trigger me to set this whole place on
fire and die in it,” Arya said in the video.
After he threatened to harm the children, the police and security made a forced entry through the bathroom. The Mumbai Fire Brigade helped the police by using hydraulic tools to cut open the grills and make way
for the police to enter
the studio.
Arya had confined the children on the ground floor of the studio. The police have recovered the air gun and some chemical containers from the scene.
Talking to media persons after the rescue operation, Deputy Commissioner of Police Datta Nalawade said: “We have rescued 17 children, one senior citizen and another person”
During the course of investigations, it has come to light that Arya had earlier alleged that a Government department owed him payment for carrying out a campaign called the PLC Sanitation Monitor Project, launched under the Chief Minister’s My School, Beautiful School campaign, which was aimed to make schoolchildren “ambassadors of cleanliness”. According to him, the department concerned had sanctioned `2 crore for his work but had not paid him since January 2024. Arya had gone on hunger strike last year, alleging that department officials had side-lined him from the programme despite personal assurances given to him from the then Education Minister Deepak Kesarkar.
Arya had claimed that the then minister had issued him two cheques of `7 lakh and `8 lakh as personal assistance, promising more later which “were not fulfilled”.
Meanwhile, the police have launched a detailed investigation to understand how Arya managed to organise the fake audition and lure children to the studio.
