The 15-year-old girl was the eldest of some 25 kids that were taken captive by convicted murderer Subhash Batham, in a village in Uttar Pradesh on Thursday. The horrific case that sent shockwaves across India ended with the man being shot dead by police and his wife, allegedly an accomplice in the grim enterprise, stoned to death by an angry crowd.

The children, some as young as 6 months of age, were lured to the man’s house with a promise of a birthday party Subhash said he was hosting for his daughter. It was a blatant lie, and when parents felt something fishy was going on and came banging on his door, they were met with gunfire and a crude bomb.

If not for one brave girl, the horror story might have never had its happy ending. The girl, as cited by the Indian Express, said that once all the children had arrived for the party that was not to be, the captor forced them into the basement, threatening to shoot them on the spot if they disobeyed his order.

The 15-year-old said that she tried to calm the youngsters down, telling them “if we die, we will die together.” 

“I was not sure if saying such things would help, but it did,” she said.

As the smaller kids started getting hungry, she asked Subhash for food – which police then handed over to them. However, with the standoff going well into the night, the girl saw that the attacker was getting angrier and feared that he could go berserk any minute.

Then she decided it was time to act, and the killer’s blunder was the chance she seized upon.

“Subhash was getting angry and I knew I had to do something. When he and his wife left the basement, I locked the door. He heard the sound of the door being locked and started banging on the door. I did not open it.”

The girl said she understood at the moment that if she gave in, she and all the other kids would likely now be dead.

“The children were crying, but I knew if I opened the door, he will kill us.”

She said she unlocked the door only after police descended on the house, taking out the perpetrator.

It was somewhat of a miracle that all of the kids had survived the ordeal, considering the man was a convicted murderer, was embroiled in several lawsuits and had his house stacked to the ceiling with weapons. His impressive cache, it was later revealed, included some 145 crude bombs, a pistol, and a .315 rifle. A used cartridge of an AK-47 was also recovered. 

“The quantity of bombs was good enough to kill everyone in a radius of 50 metres if they went off at once,” the Farrukhabad special operation task force observed, according to the Times of India.

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