Child trafficking gang busted, eight arrested

Eight arrested in child trafficking racket; one-year-old girl rescued; investigation reveals involvement in previous cases; search ongoing for missing two-year-old son.

Eight people involved in an inter-state child trafficking racket have been arrested, police said on Friday and added that a one-year-old girl who had been sold off by her parents was rescued.

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The crime came to light on Thursday after a woman reported her brother and sister-in-law to the police claiming that they had sold off two of their two children to fund their drug habit. The DN Nagar police registered a case against the parents – Shabbir Khan, 28, and Saniya Khan, 26, and Shakeel Makrani, 42, who had bought their 50-day-old daughter, and arrested all of them on Thursday night. The girl was rescued.

On Friday, five more people were arrested. They are Usha Rathod, 42, the agent who facilitated selling the Khan couple’s daughter, Manikamma Narsappa, 63, who had helped sell their son 18 months ago, Vaishali Phagariya Jain, 45, Shafique Haroon Shaikh, 45, and Balkrushna Kamble, 33.

“We rescued the newborn daughter of the Khan couple on Thursday a few hours after the case was registered. Through the parents and the buyer, we could track down the agents. During interrogation, they revealed that they had all been involved in similar trafficking cases before,” said inspector Daya Nayak, in-charge of crime branch unit 9, which is investigating the matter.

Phagariya and Kamble confessed to having been involved in trafficking four children each while Shaikh admitted to five such involvements, police officers said.

“Kamble even sold his one-year-old daughter to Jain with the help of Shaikh. We rescued the girl today from Jain’s home in Byculla. Both the rescued children are in the custody of the child welfare committee,” deputy commissioner of police (detection 1) Rajtilak Roshan said.

With the arrest of the eight accused, the police claimed to have detected eight cases wherein children had been sold off to people in Mumbai, Palghar, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. A search is underway for the two-year-old son of the Khans.