Mumbai: The Bombay high court recently rejected the bail plea of a couple arrested for allegedly kidnapping a then four-year-old girl from Madhya Pradesh and then selling her to a bar girl in Mumbai seven years ago. The bar girl had bought the minor for Rs 25,000, hoping to train her as a bar dancer to earn from her in the future. The minor, however, had retained her memory about her biological parents and told about her kidnapping to the mother of her friend.
The friend’s mother alerted Rakhi Sharma, a social worker, who informed the police. They traced the minor’s MP-based parents and reunited her with them.
The case first came to light when Bindiya, the girl, informed her friend’s mother Mamta Soni that her real name was Santoshi and some unknown persons kidnapped her when she was very young and took her to various places before selling her to Kamala, with whom she was living currently.
“Santoshi was able to tell her parents name as Ramesh and Seeta so we started probing this matter and during investigation Kamala accepted that she had bought this Santoshi in 2010 for Rs 25,000, who was kidnapped from Satna district of MP,” said PSI Jitendra Wagh. “At that time the only clue we had as per Santoshi’s statement was her mother used to sell bangles near a well where a lot of busses used to come (a bus depot),” he said.
Mr Wagh added, “With the help of our counterparts in MP we came to know there were four such bus depots. We were then led to a missing complaint registered in 2010. Though the names of parents also matched, we suffered a blow when we were told this girl had been traced in 2013.” However it turned out that the girl that was found in 2013 was not the couple’s daughter. The couple had handed her over to a shelter home without informing the police.
Finally, the MIDC police reunited Santoshi with her parents and arrested the accused involved in kidnapping and selling her.
The two accused kidnappers, Ganga and her husband Shivshankar Sisodiya, had filed for bail, saying they were falsely implicated in the case. However, Justice Sadhna Jadhav observed that the victim spent considerable time with kidnappers and identified them before the police.
