With the police chasing leads and hunting down the suspects, hopefully there will be a second act where the  abductors will be arrested. In this regard, though it did not grab the headlines, it has to be noted that the police not only rescued two Bangladeshis and two Myanmars  but also captured 11 members of the foreign workers kidnapping gang on the very same day.

What distinguished the two situations is that in the first, release followed the payment of a ransom, whereas in the second, the police raided and freed the hostages, who were locked up in a shophouse. What also set the two events apart was the fact that in the second situation, the kidnappers and their hostages were in a fixed location, making it possible for the police to surround the place and rescue the victims and capture the criminals. On the other hand, as the schoolboy was taken from the street where he was abducted to an unknown location, and contact with the kidnappers was indirect, through Facebook in this case, the first concern of the police was the boy's safety and release, not the immediate arrest of the criminals, and rightly so.

Mercifully, he was freed without harm because his family could raise the ransom. Scottish aid worker Khalil Dale, who was kidnapped in Pakistan in January, was not so lucky. His body was found in Quetta last Sunday with a note saying he was killed because a ransom was not paid. The fate of Australian Warren Rodwell, who made a plea on Saturday for a ransom to save him from a beheading by the Abu Sayyaf, the group responsible for the high-profile kidnapping of tourists in the diving resort of Sipadan, Sabah in 2000, remains unclear. The same goes for the British banker abducted by al-Qaeda while he was on holiday in Timbuktu, Mali, last November. These three cases illustrate the increasing incidents of kidnapping and hostage-taking by terrorist groups with the aim of raising funds or gaining political concessions, which was noted by the United Nations Security Council on Friday. They also raise the thorny question whether paying ransom is justified as a last resort, even when the money goes to fund terrorist activities and increases the danger that others will be taken hostage, as innocent lives are on the line.