Teen, abducted by man who lied about his name, faith, found after nearly 2 months
The man abandoned the girl in an auto-rickshaw in Badarpur on October 26, three days after he took her away by promising to marry her.
Nearly two months after a 15-year-old girl was reported missing from her west Delhi home, police on Saturday said they found her in Badarpur, southeast Delhi. They said she had been abducted in October by a man who had lied about his name and faith on social media.
Police have arrested Shoyab Khan, 18, who allegedly abducted her after meeting her on Facebook. They said Khan had posed as SK Sinha on the social media website, adding that he had abandoned the girl in an auto-rickshaw in Badarpur on October 26, three days after he took her away by promising to marry her.
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Deputy commissioner of police (west) Deepak Purohit said police filed a case of abduction on October 23 after the girl’s father informed them she was missing. During the investigation, police checked the call details of the girl’s cellphone and her social media accounts.
“We found that she had been frequently receiving messages from one SK Sinha. We collected details of the account holder from the service provider, and discovered that it was created by one Shoyab Khan of Alwar, Rajasthan,” said DCP Purohit.
Police said the man took her to different places in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and abandoned her three days later after learning that police were looking for him. Delhi Police officers said they found the girl in a house in Badarpur, where she had been working since October 26. She told police that she was afraid of returning home.
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Police said that to find the teenager, the investigating team camped in several parts of Mewat region in Haryana and Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi for 46 days, suspecting that she may have been abducted by human traffickers.
The investigating team raided Khan’s home, but he was missing, along with his family and relatives. The police said that one of the investigators was stationed in Mewat region to look for information on the whereabouts of the suspect. The rest of them carried out raids and scanned CCTV camera footage.
The team also visited Bihar’s Muzaffarpur and Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh after technical surveillance of the suspect’s cellphone indicated his presence there. Two of his Facebook friends in both cities confirmed that the suspect had stayed at their homes with the girl.
“The suspect told his friends that he had married her. But when they found out that the girl was a minor and they were not married, they refused to shelter them anymore,” said an investigator, who did not want to be named.
The first breakthrough in the case, the officer said, came on December 8, when they located Khan and arrested him from Delhi’s Badarpur border. He then told the police that he had abandoned her in Badarpur.
Police then launched a search operation to find the auto-rickshaw in which Khan had abandoned her.
On December 9, the police found the auto-rickshaw and spoke to its driver, who claimed that he had dropped the girl near Badarpur Extension. After six hours of a door-to-door search operation, the police found her, the officer said. “Khan, who is a college student in Rajasthan, has been booked for abduction and criminal conspiracy. He has been sent to jail. If the girl levels other allegations, he will be booked under those sections too,” the officer added.
Investigating officers said Khan is not part of any organised gang that endorses interfaith marriage or forces minors into changing their religions.
