Muscat: The Buraimi Criminal Court has handed a seven-and-a-half-year jail sentence to a three-member gang for kidnapping a 12-year-old boy last year.
The trio abducted the boy as he came out of his school. The boy was waiting to be taken home in Buraimi, northwest off Muscat, the Oman newspaper reported on Saturday.
The three-member gang has demanded a ransom of Dh6 million from the boy's father, a businessman. One of the abductors was a former employee of the businessman.
The prison sentence has put an end to the high-profile kidnapping case that shook the sleepy Omani border town with UAE on April 21, 2009.
According to the Arabic daily, the group had kept a watch of the movements of the boy's school transport driver, who also ferried the other children for the family.
At noon on that day, as the driver collected the kidnapped boy's brothers from another school, the first suspect flattened the tyres of the vehicle and gave the signal to the other two suspects to abduct the child.
The second and third suspects conned the boy into approaching their vehicle by telling him there was a sick woman in there who needed help.
They pulled the boy inside the vehicle, masked him, shut the doors and drove off to an unknown destination.
Fearing police, who were hot on their heels, the kidnappers panicked and in less than 24 hours, they returned the boy near his house.
Police later caught the suspects.
