Baby’s day out ends in hours as alert cabbie, cop nail kidnapper

Around 12:15 pm on September 12, Afreen was dealing with a customer, her back being towards her child. Five minutes later, as she glanced towards the cradle to check if all was well with her child, she found the baby was gone. Afreen raised an alarm. While other vendors fanned out in the area to look for the baby, Afreen rushed to the Gamdevi police station.

“It was one of those rare cases where a complainant had come to us within an hour of the commission of the crime. Too often, we lament about loss of valuable time in cases of children being kidnapped. We immediately rushed a team to the Haji Ali subway to make enquiries,” said an officer with the Gamdevi police. Senior Police Inspector Pradip Lonandkar, the then in-charge of the police station, said that footage of the CCTV camera mounted at the entrance of the Haji Ali subway was pulled out immediately.

The footage showed a woman dressed in pink picking up the girl. The cameras had captured Afreen’s back as she helped a customer at that precise moment. The police fanned out and the breakthrough came an hour later, when a taxi driver remembered dropping a woman with a child to Byculla.

“He remembered her because she had not paid her fare and had instead pleaded with him to let her go as she needed to get her ‘daughter’ to Lucknow as soon as possible,” said Lonandkar.

Six teams were rushed to all stations which had trains halting for Lucknow. Each team was led by an officer, who, before leaving for the railway station that he was assigned, scribbled his name, contact number and the description of the kidnapped girl on several chits of paper. The officers then started handing out to the chits railway policemen, Railway Protection Force personnel and civilians at their assigned railway stations.

Around 4:10 am on Friday, RPF constable K S Bhalerao, posted at the Lokmanya Tilak Terminus was about to leave for home when he saw a woman dressed in pink clothes and carrying a child. She matched the description he had heard on wireless radio hours ago.

When Bhalerao approached her, the woman was cagey and told Bhalerao to leave him alone. When he knew he had got her confidence, he slipped away for a minute and contacted sub-inspector Sunil Mane of the Gamdevi police, who was heading the team working at LTT, telling him he had a possible suspect in custody.

With a job to detain the woman without alerting her, Bhalerao managed to win her confidence, telling her he was only doing his job by helping out a lone woman with a child. He took her to the railway food-stall, where he bought milk for the baby girl. He was able to engage the woman in a long conversation so much so that they sat on the same bench for two hours. His act was so convincing that when woman constables arrived to pick her up, she said she won’t leave with anyone other than her new found “brother”.

The suspect, Shabnam Sheikh (40), was taken to the police station along with her child, where Afreen identified the baby as Babu. Shabnam was arrested for kidnapping.

An officer said Shabnam had claimed during interrogation that she had been childless despite two marriages and could not resist the opportunity on seeing Babu lying unattended in her cradle.

gautam.mengle@expressindia.com