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A one-year-old girl who was allegedly abducted by two women from a footpath in Mumbai’s Vile Parle on Sunday night was reunited with her mother by a team of the Mumbai Crime Branch on Wednesday.
The girl, Fatima, was sleeping with her grandmother on a footpath near SNDT College on Juhu Tara Road in Vile Parle when the two women who resided in the same area abducted her, the police said. They were headed towards Telangana to sell her when they were apprehended mid-way by the Mumbai police and placed under arrest. It is not clear who was the buyer in this case and the purpose for which she was being purchased, the police said.
The incident comes a week after the Mumbai police had arrested a Wadala-based couple for abducting a two-month-old baby from South Mumbai in order to sell it to a childless couple.
“The girl who was residing on the footpath had been abducted by two women from her locality who wanted to sell it to someone in Telangana. They were however apprehended in Solapur by our team with the help of Solapur Railway Protection Force (RPF). The two women have been arrested and we will conduct further investigation to find out who else was involved in the racket,” Mumbai Police Commissioner Vivek Phansalkar said on Thursday.
As per the statement given by the girl’s mother Muskan Shaikh (24), around 10 pm on Sunday, she had gone to gather plastic which she sells as junk and left Fatima in the care of her grandmother. She said that when she returned around 1 am, she found that her mother was sleeping and Fatima was missing. “Initially I thought her father – who collects alms – had taken her. However, when he said that she was not with him, I approached the local Santacruz police where an FIR was registered,” Muskan said.
Phansalkar said that the local police and Crime Branch (Unit IX) found a CCTV grab in which two women were seen taking the girl. DCP Sangramsinh Nishandar said, “On circulating the photographs, the women were identified as locals Sharifa Shaikh and Sujata Paswan. The two women, who are employed by caterers for washing utensils, were missing too.”
Realising that the girl was with them, the police team started tracking them down. During further investigation, the police said they found that the women had gone to Telangana to sell the girl to someone.
Sources said that after the family members of the two women were detained, the two accused realised that their game was up. They then started returning to the city by train. The police, however, with help from Solapur RPF, managed to detain the two women at the railway station and rescued the girl.
While the two women were placed under arrest, the girl was reunited with her mother. “I am thankful to the police for tracking down my girl,” Muskan said.
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