Mumbai police locate four runaway siblings in Madhya Pradesh

Mumbai police rescued 18-year-old woman and her siblings from MP after fleeing father's harassment. Awarded for best detection of the month.

Mumbai: An 18-year-old woman, along with her three younger siblings, was rescued by the MIDC police from Madhya Pradesh and brought back to Mumbai on Monday.

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The four siblings, residents of Andheri East, had fled with their stepmother and sought refuge in an ashram in Gwalior on May 26. The MIDC police located them within eight days after registering a case of kidnapping.

Aged 18, 15, 8, and 11 respectively, the siblings sold their old school books and household scraps to gather money for the journey, allegedly to escape their father’s harassment.

According to the police, they found the four at the ashram after identifying a person whose mobile phone the siblings used to call their friend Riyaz in Uttar Pradesh. To execute their plan, the siblings convinced their 35-year-old stepmother to travel with them until Madhya Pradesh and then abandoned her at a railway station. She got off the train at Khandwa railway station in MP after learning about their plan.

Officers at MIDC police station said that the mother got off the train thinking that the kids would follow her. However, they did not, and the train left the station. After being abandoned, the woman returned to Andheri alone on May 28, after which her husband and family members suspected that she had abandoned the kids and registered a case of kidnapping against an unknown person.

The police created several teams led by ACP Shashikant Bhosale and senior inspector Satish Gaikwad, who scanned through the CCTVs of Mumbai and Delhi railway stations and discovered that the siblings had contacted a friend in UP using a mobile phone borrowed from a passenger who deboarded at Gwalior.

“Through this, officers tracked the children’s location,” said a police officer. The siblings revealed they ran away due to harassment from their father and left a note, stating, “They should not be handed over to their father if he comes to take their custody.”

The police team scanned about 70 CCTV cameras at Jaipur railway station and in the city before locating the children at the ashram. They had enrolled themselves there with the help of a stranger.

The eldest sibling, a 18-year-old first-year commerce student, wrote to the ashram, stating that they would not return if their father came to pick them up.

Their maternal uncle accompanied the police to take their custody. The four siblings were produced before the Child Welfare Commission in MP. The Mumbai police commissioner has awarded the MIDC police team with the best detection of the month reward for locating the four.