The young men holding the claw they devised in a matter of hours grabbing iron rods from a nearby construction site to rescue Jihad from the well. Photo: Collected\Rashed Shumon They did not have any rescue operation experience. Nor did they have any technical sophistication to do what trained professionals equipped with the best-available equipment in the country failed to. But in an example of m
ind over matter, five youths made a claw out of scraps and pulled out a four-year-old boy yesterday from an around 300-foot well shaft 23 hours after his fall. The boy, Jihad, could not be saved. But that they successfully located and pulled out the boy in less than half an hour after the government called off the rescue bid saying there was no sign of the boy inside the borehole, made them heroes in public eyes. It was a coordinated effort of Anwar Hossain, Nur Mohammad Litu, Abu Bakar Siddique Bablu, Shafiqul Islam Faroque and Kabir Murad Bhuiyan, aged between 17 and 35. Anwar is a CCTV camera technician, Litu a ninth grader of Shahjahanpur Railway Colony High School, Bablu a supplier to super shops, Murad a Textile Engineering student of Ahsanullah Science and Technology University, and Faroque, a trader. They did not know one another until they all gathered at Shahjahanpur Railway Colony from different areas in the capital hours after the news of Jihad's fall spread. While they were seeing the government agencies failing over and over again in their rescue attempts, they felt an urge to do something on their own. Advertisement With the help of some local, they made a claw and modified it a few times before they succeeded in pulling the boy out of the hole. "After watching the rescue operation on television, I thought it was possible to locate the child with my own camera and rescue him with a catcher," Anwar told The Daily Star yesterday evening. People looking at a TV screen to view the images being fed by the camera. Photo: Collected\Rashed Shumon "I rushed to the spot with a CCTV camera, monitor and some other equipment around 10:30pm from my home at Tilpapara in Khilgaon." "I knew how to locate something with a CCTV camera but I had no idea how to pull something out of a hole so deep," he said, adding: "We five along with some other locals made a catcher around 1:00am yesterday but the law enforcers did not allow us to use it." However, they had a chance to try their device out around 4:00am after the authorities formally declared that they could not locate any human being inside the well, he said. "We tried several times, but failed. We modified the catcher four times until 3:00pm when we succeeded in locating the boy and bringing him out of the well," he said. HOW THE CATCHER WAS MADE Mounted on the claw inside the well. Photo: Collected\Rashed Shumon They took three iron rods -- each around 4 feet long and had six hooks hinged to their lower ends. They made two rings and welded the rods to them to give the tool a cylindrical shape. A torch and the CCTV camera were fitted at the middle of the frame, using duct tape. The camera was connected to a 21-inch TV monitor with a long cable. Then they lowered in the contraption using a rope, with their eyes glued to the monitor. When the claw hit the bottom, they saw what looked like a child's hand. On a closer look, they realised it was what they were looking for, the whole nation had been anxiously waiting and praying for nearly a day. The motionless body of Jihad was there. They managed to get the body hooked to the claw and pulled it out around 3:00pm, just 15-minutes after the government called off its rescue operation, to the cheers of a few hundred onlookers.
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