Bhubaneswar, March 22 (IANS) Thousands of people, including women and children, Monday took out a march in Orissa's Sambalpur town to protest kidnapping of a trader's son, police said.

People marched on the streets and assembled at a temple to pray for the wellbeing of the boy, a senior district police official said.

'If police do not rescue the boy within seven days, we will observe a bandh (shutdown) in the town,' advocate Gobinda Narayan Agarwal, a resident of Sambalpur, told IANS.

Rishab Agarwal, 13, was abducted at gunpoint from his home in the town's Poddar colony March 18 by five unidentified men Sambalpur is over 300 km from here.

Although police have launched a manhunt and sent teams to Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, they have not yet succeeded in tracing the boy.