Cops rescue 12-year-old who was kidnapped, forced into sex work

According to the police, the child lived with her mother in south-west Delhi. Her mother reported her missing on January 21 after which a kidnapping case was registered at Kapashera police station.

A 12-year-old girl who was kidnapped from south-west Delhi in January, burnt with cigarette butts, forced into prostitution, and raped by several men, was rescued by the Delhi Police on Tuesday.

According to the police, the child lived with her mother in south-west Delhi. Her mother reported her missing on January 21 after which a kidnapping case was registered at Kapashera police station.

Police also arrested two men, Sanjay Rajput and Anshu Sharma, and two women, Sapna Goyal and Kanika Roy, who allegedly kidnapped and forced the girl into prostitution.

Police said there could be a wider prostitution racket run by the four persons.

The police are now probing the racketeers to know if they had kidnapped other children and forced them into the sex trade. The identities of the men, who allegedly raped the minor girl, are also being ascertained as it appears that some of the men knew that the girl was a minor.

According to the police, the child lived with her mother in south-west Delhi. Her mother reported her missing on January 21 after which a kidnapping case was registered at Kapashera police station.

The police probe has now revealed that the girl was kidnapped when she went out to buy chips from a local shop. The four kidnappers — two of them from her own neighbourhood — took her to a nearby house on the pretext of offering her a piece of a birthday cake. The cake, however, was spiked and the girl fell unconscious after eating it, said Urvija Goel, deputy commissioner of police (west).

Thereafter, to force the girl into prostitution, they tortured her and offered her drugs, the details of which are yet to be ascertained, the DCP said.

Once the girl was not in a position to resist, she was pushed into prostitution and raped by men in Delhi and Bihar. “There are text messages to reveal that some men looking for young women were offered the child and informed that she was a minor,” said the unnamed investigator quoted above.

The prostitution gang dealt with their customers through WhatsApp. “There were over 150 WhatsApp groups of this racket and had a thousand customers from across India,” Goel said.

Police said a team from Rajouri Garden police station in west Delhi was trying to trace some missing children when this girl’s name cropped up. Sometime last month, the police team got in touch with the girl’s mother and realised that the girl was kidnapped by traffickers.

“About a month after her disappearance, the kidnappers allowed the girl to make a phone call to her mother. Her mother wasn’t told about her location,” said a second investigator.

Eventually, the police used the communication between the mother and the kidnappers to pursue an online trail left by the suspects. The police traced the girl to Majnu ka Tilla in North Delhi on Tuesday from where she was rescued.

Chinmoy Biswal, Delhi Police spokesperson, said local police as well as the crime branch, have been pursuing prostitution rackets, particularly those suspected of trafficking women and minor girls. “We also take every missing complaint related to children very seriously. Even this child was traced due to our constant efforts to trace all missing children,” he said.