New Delhi, January 7: Delhi Police on Sunday claimed to have safely rescued a nine-month-old baby from Firozpur in Punjab, nearly 50 days after he was kidnapped from a pavement near Bangla Sahib gurdwara in central Delhi.
A 20-year-old woman, who had kidnapped the child, and her 45-year-old male associate were arrested.
The child had gone missing on November 18 last year. But a police case was registered only on January 2 this year, a day after the child’s parents had allegedly already traced and nabbed the 20-year-old woman from near Palika Market parking lot on their own.
The parents of the ‘abducted’ child claim that they had informed the Parliament Street police station about their son’s kidnapping on November 18, as soon as they figured that he had gone missing with the woman.
“When we went to the police, the personnel there asked us to trace the woman since only we had seen her and had no photographs of her. They also assured us that they will register a case and make efforts to trace our son and the woman,” the child’s mother said.
Deputy commissioner of police (New Delhi) Madhur Verma claimed that the parents of the missing child approached them only on January 1. “The parents came to the police station and reported about their missing child only on January 1. We immediately registered a case and sent our team to Punjab’s Ludhiana and Kurukshetra in Haryana, on indication of the accused (woman’s) presence there, to rescue the child. The woman initially tried to mislead us but later broke down and took us to a village in Firozpur from where the child was rescued.”
The infant, police said, was found inside the jhuggi of 45-year-old Ajit Singh, a resident of Haraj village in Firozpur. The woman, Sapna alias Kajal, had kept the child at his home. The two wanted to raise him as their own child, police said.
Police said Sapna told them that she had kidnapped the child because she was unable to conceive even four years after her marriage. Sapna’s husband had been arrested in a crime three years ago and is in jail.
“After her husband’s arrest, Sapna went to Punjab’s Amritsar and started living on a footpath outside the Golden Temple (gurdwara). There she met Ajit Singh, a pavement dweller, and they started living together. When she again failed to conceive, Sapna returned to Delhi and began living on pavements outside Bangla Sahib gurudwara and in Paharganj near the New Delhi railway station,” said a police officer.
The child’s parents – Pooja Devi and Mangal Singh – said that Sapna had been living with them on pavements near the gurdwara for the past two-three months. Sapna often used to babysit the child when his parents were away for work.
Pooja said that on the morning of November 18, Sapna came and took her son away, saying she was going to have tea and wanted to play with the child for some time.
“I got worried when Sapna went missing with my son. I alerted my husband and we launched a search in our locality. When we failed to find our child, we approached the Parliament Street police station,” she said.
On January 1, the couple spotted Sapna near Palika Market and nabbed her. She was brought before the police. The police interrogated her and later recovered the child.
A resident of Kurukshetra, Sapna had fled her home around five years ago. Her parents are slum dwellers.
Source Hindustan Times
