It took three weeks of back-and-forth rides in a car through UP, Haryana, and Punjab for Sub-Inspector (SI) Amit Sharma and his team to track down two brothers, aged 15 and 9, who had gone missing from their home in Badarpur last month. On the trail of the children, the police team followed grainy CCTV footage, chased clues on Instagram reels that led to nowhere, and examined and filtered out claims on sightings that turned out to be fake. The children were ultimately found at the Golden Temple in Amritsar on Wednesday evening – only hours after the team had paid an initial visit to the shrine, and had come away disappointed. It might just have been divine intervention, feels SI Sharma. “We had checked the Golden Temple in the morning but we did not find the children. We went back in the evening – and suddenly, without warning, the younger child appeared in front of us,” Sharma said. The search for the children began in the morning of September 10, after a case of kidnapping was registered at Badarpur police station. The father of the missing children has a business, and their mother is a dietician, police said. “The parents of the children quarrelled frequently, and the children did not like it. Their mother was also strict with them, so the children decided to leave home,” Sharma said. Apart from some CCTV camera footage, the police had very little to go on. They scanned pictures from railway stations, but a lot of the footage was of poor quality or incomplete. They helped the team make some progress, but steps had to be often retraced to cross-check or verify information. After scanning footage from dozens of cameras on September 10, police reached the Ghaziabad and New Delhi railway stations. It seemed the boys had entered the New Delhi station around 5 pm but could not be seen on the CCTV footage anymore after 6.30 pm. After learning that the family had taken the Shivganga Express to Varanasi earlier that month, the police surmised the children may have taken that train again. However, another train, the Mahamana Express, also travels on the same route, leaving New Delhi around 6.30 pm — the time since when the children could not be spotted on the CCTV footage. The police then suspected the children may have taken Mahamana Express to Varanasi. For days, the police combed CCTV footage in Varanasi, and checked railway stations along the way. They checked if the children may have tried to visit relatives in UP. Everywhere, they hit a wall. A staffer on the Mahamana Express told the police that he may have seen the children at Moradabad station. But a search of CCTV footage revealed nothing. The investigators returned to Delhi – only to be called back to Moradabad to look at more footage. Meanwhile, a friend of the older boy claimed he had seen them in a video made in Hisar and posted on Instagram, and that the brothers were headed to Rajasthan to meet a favourite YouTuber. The team rushed to Hisar, where they contacted more than 50 local creators of video content. But the purported Instagram reel could not be found, and the trail ran cold. Police then got information that the brothers had been seen near a train bound for Amritsar. The team rushed to Amritsar. Success came on Wednesday, when the police spotted the two brothers at the Golden Temple. Their parents, who too were in the city, were reunited with them. It appeared that the boys had travelled to Moradabad from New Delhi, and then to Amritsar, where they had spent a considerable time. “What began as a missing persons report became a testament to patience and perseverance. For more than three weeks, three policemen stitched together fragments of digital trails, sat through countless hours of CCTV footage, and travelled across states, refusing to accept defeat. In the end, against all odds, the children were found,” DCP South-East Hemant Tiwari said.
