Though Rohit Arya’s plan ended miserably when a bullet from police struck him in the chest, the incident had been carefully planned days in advance. For nearly three hours on a tense Thursday afternoon in Mumbai, a 50-year-old man identified as Rohit Arya managed to keep the police at bay while keeping 17 children hostage inside a Powai studio. Though he failed miserably when the bullet from officer Amol Waghmare’s gun hit him in the chest, the stunt that he pulled off had been meticulously planned days in advance.
A police reconstruction of events revealed that Arya had precisely planned the hostage situation, installing motion sensors and other devices in the studio before he invited boys and girls aged between 10 and 15 years for a fake audition. Arya, who had rented the studio four days earlier under the pretext of holding a routine acting test for a web series, was armed with an airgun and a flammable spray.
How the hostage crisis began
According to the police, the incident unfolded around 1.30 pm after a distress call was received from RA Studio located in Mahavir Classic, a commercial-cum-residential complex in Mumbai’s Powai. However, by 1 pm, anxious parents waiting outside had already begun to worry when none of the children returned for lunch. Moments later, residents in an adjacent building noticed some of the children crying and pleading for help through the glass windows and immediately raised an alarm.
Within minutes, multiple police teams, including the Quick Response Team (QRT), bomb squad, and fire brigade, rushed to the scene to begin rescue operation that would go on for nearly three and a half hours. Arya had warned the police not to enter the premises and threatened to set the studio ablaze if they tried to storm in. A police official, according to an Indian Express report, said that Arya had been preparing for the incident for several days, setting up and testing motion sensors inside the studio from Monday onward.
“We found that he had installed motion sensors in the past few days when the ‘auditions’ were being held, as he was preparing for Thursday,” the officer said, adding that Arya had even connected the devices to a mobile phone that would alert him to any movement. This made it nearly impossible for rescuers to approach the building from the front.
