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Missing Lucknow teen found dead within hours; cops’ error kept kin searching for days
The teenager was found to have died the night she went missing, barely one kilometre from her home in Saumya Vihar Colony under Talkatora police station limits. Her body was recovered near railway tracks in the adjoining Para police station area, filed as unidentified, then cremated as an unclaimed body three days later.
Within hours of 17-year-old Nayan vanishing on December 22, 2025, her body was recovered near railway tracks in Lucknow. Within three days, it was cremated. Yet for 99 days, her mother Geeta Kumari searched while police stations passed the file between them, failing to match a missing girl with an unidentified body found the same night, just a kilometre away. The high court took one intervention to connect what local police could not.
The teenager was found to have died the night she went missing, barely one kilometre from her home in Saumya Vihar Colony under Talkatora police station limits. Her body was recovered near railway tracks in the adjoining Para police station area, filed as unidentified, then cremated as an unclaimed body three days later.
Geeta said her daughter had stepped out that evening to buy groceries from a nearby shop and never returned.
The truth emerged only after Geeta Kumari, a class IV employee with the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC), approached the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court with her son through advocates Sandeep Yadav and Ajay Singh. A division bench of Justice Rajnish Kumar and Justice Zafeer Ahmad on February 10 directed the investigating officer to submit a detailed status report on steps taken to trace the minor. Only after the court’s order did police revisit records and discover the unidentified girl’s body recovered on December 22.
Geeta has now alleged possible foul play. “We suspect murder. We will seek a proper probe. If the police do not investigate further, we will again go to the high court to seek justice,” she said.
She alleged that the man named in the FIR filed by the family has been missing since police informed them of the girl’s death. “The prime suspect named in the FIR is absconding. The house is locked, the entire family is missing,” she said.
According to the family, Geeta approached the Talkatora police station the same night. She kept visiting repeatedly, yet the FIR was registered only on December 26, four days after the disappearance. Despite repeated appeals to police, senior officers, and the chief minister’s grievance portal, no serious attempt was made to trace the girl or verify whether any unidentified body had been recovered in nearby police jurisdictions.
Police later informed the family that the girl had allegedly been hit by, or fallen from, a moving train. By then, however, the body had already been cremated.
Advocates Yadav and Singh said they would press for a proper probe. “We suspect murder. We will seek a detailed investigation. The indifferent attitude of the police has deepened the tragedy,” they said. They also questioned the cremation process. “How was the body cremated without adequate public notice? There are Supreme Court guidelines for handling unidentified bodies,” they said.
Kuldeep Dubey, Talkatora SHO, said the complaint was lodged four days after the girl went missing. “By then the body had already been cremated. We recently received information about the unidentified body found in the Para area. We showed the photographs to the family for identification,” he said. His explanation, however, intensified questions over why adjoining police records were not checked immediately after the missing complaint was filed.
Suresh Singh, Para SHO, maintained that due procedure had been followed. “The body was sent for postmortem. Information was circulated through newspapers and social media before cremation,” he said.
