In a recent child abduction case, a seven-month-old baby taken from Mathura’s railway station last week was eventually found at the house of a local Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) corporator, who allegedly bought him for INR 1.8 lakhs from a child trafficking racket.
Stating the scenario of the case, the local police said, “The child was sleeping next to his mother on the platform at Mathura railway station on August 24 when he was abducted. After searching for several days, he was recovered from the house of a BJP corporator from Firozabad, Vinita Aggarwal, and her husband Krishna Murari Aggarwal, with investigators identifying a racket, headed by a doctor couple from Hathras. Investigations are on to identify other members of the racket.”
The doctor couple- Prem Bihari, 38, and his wife Dayawati, 38, now under police custody, used a local hospice, Bankey Behari Hospital to carry out their illegal business of child abduction along with their four associates, Deep Kumar, 40, Poonam, 43, Manjeet, 43, and Vimlesh, 38, as mentioned by the sources.
Besides, the police have also arrested the main accused- the BJP corporator from Firozabad City, Vinita Agarwal 49, and her husband Krishna Murari, 51.
“The child was sleeping with his mother, a complainant in this case, on the platform. A case was registered at GRP Mathura under section 363 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for kidnapping,” said Mohammad Mushtaq, Superintendent of Police (SP) for Government Railway Police (GRP).
He furthered, “Deep Kumar was seen travelling in a roadways bus and the conductor identified him and he was arrested. This opened the case and doctors were traced leading to clues on the whereabouts of the child.”
During the interaction, the SP stated, “A deal was negotiated for the child at INR 1.80 lakh and an amount of 85,000 was recovered during the arrest.”
Mentioning the strategy for conducting the operation to trace the missing child, Mushtaq said- A surveillance team was activated that worked out on the CCTV footage of the incident. Luckily, the efforts paid dividends and the entire racket of child trafficking was busted.
During the inspection, it was found that the network was spread across the tri-cities: Agra, Firozabad and Mathura. The search team has started questioning the locals regarding the case. Meanwhile, the investigations are still on and police are working as per the identified clues, which surfaced during the search operation.
According to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, over 50,000 (59,262) children went missing in the year 2020. This specified that over 4,938 children went missing every month in 2020 and reportedly nearly 1,08,234 children remain untraced to date.
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