When Prince Karim Aga Khan’s horse worth a million pounds was kidnapped

Aga Khan III Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah once visited Germany as the head of the League of Nations. There, Hitler offered him 40 German-made vehicles in exchange for one of his horses, but the Aga Khan turned him down.

The Aga Khan’s family has been known for centuries for breeding high-quality horses. By the way, among his horses, Mumtaz Mahal, Bahram, Khusrau, Maharaj, Talyar and Zarkawah became very famous in the history of the race course, but the fame achieved by Prince Karim Aga Khan’s horse ‘Shergar’ did not come to any other horse. .

Shergar first competed in the race in 1980. However, he gained international fame in 1981 when he won the Derby race in Great Britain by a record margin and set a world record. In the two hundred year history of the Derby race, this honor has never been achieved by any other horse.

After that, Shergar went on to win successive competitions and emerged as the most successful horse that year, winning five out of six matches. However, Shergar’s performance in the new season of the following year was not impressive after which Prince Karim Aga Khan decided to retire the horse from racing and sent him to his farmhouse in Ireland.

News of Shergar’s arrival in Ireland made headlines and commentators hailed him as Ireland’s ‘national hero’. At that time, Shergar was worth one million pounds. After retiring, Aga Khan sold some of his shares.

After his surprise performance in the Derby, Shergar was now the favorite to breed new horses and was expected to earn millions of dollars this year. Then came February 8, 1983. At 8:30 p.m., some masked armed men entered the farm house and took an official who was in charge of horse training hostage, identified Shergar among the horses in the stable, and put them in a special horse carriage. Took along.

On their way, they also took the senior employee of the farmhouse with them and left them 20 miles away from the farmhouse, threatening to kill his family if he called the police. On his return, this official contacted the Aga Khan’s headquarters in Aiglemont, a suburb of Paris, and told them about Shergar’s abduction, and the matter reached the authorities.

The next morning the news of Shergar’s abduction had spread like wildfire. The police swung into action. In this case, one of the kidnappers contacted the authorities under a fake name and demanded a ransom of 2 million pounds for the horse.

On the other hand, rumors started circulating in the press that Shergar had been killed, but the kidnappers denied the news by leaving fresh photographs of Shergar at a local hotel. The Aga Khan was not willing to pay the ransom of two million pounds. There were two reasons for this: one was that doing so risked creating a tendency to kidnap more horses for ransom. Secondly, after selling the shares, Shergar was not only owned by Aga Khan, but there were more than 30 other partners who found it difficult to agree on a single decision.

When the ransom was not agreed to, the kidnappers cut off all contact after February 12. After that, there was no news of Shergar and the kidnappers. The police tried all conventional and non-conventional methods to trace Shergar, but to no avail.

James Murphy, the senior police officer in charge of the investigation, is said to have sought the help of magicians to trace the horse, but no trace of Shergar could be found. Many people believed that behind the kidnapping could be the IRA, or the Irish Republican Army, an organization that was active for the independence of Ireland from England. Some people even mentioned the name of Muammar Gaddafi in it. However, no organization or person has formally accepted the responsibility.

16 years have passed since this incident. Finally, in 1999, a jailed former IRA official said that Shergar was kidnapped by his organization to raise funds for its operations. According to him, after the abduction, Shergar was sitting with one leg broken in distress and the abductors did not have any properly trained person to take care of the horse. He said that the IRA had decided to release the horse when the Aga Khan’s promise of ransom was not met, but police presence and raids in the area had increased after the abduction, so they kept him. He decided to save his life by killing and the body was buried in an unknown place after hitting a burst of machine gun.

Shergar’s remains have not been found, but in his memory, the Aga Khan launched the ‘Shergar Cup’ race in 1999, in which horses from Europe and the Middle East compete every year.