Abducted four-year-old girl rescued within six hours
Taloja police acted swiftly on learning about the abduction. They tracked the number plate of kidnapper’s two-wheeler using CCTV footage, and then carried out physical search with a sniffer dog to rescue the girl unharmed. The kidnapper was arrested four hours later
Navi Mumbai
A four-year-old girl, who was kidnapped on from Taloja on Wednesday night, was rescued within six hours of the incident and handed over to her parents by Taloja police.
The child was playing with her five-year-old friend outside their residence at sector 2 in Taloja phase I, when the accused identified as Pramod Mahto (30), who came out from a nearby hair salon, came to the two girls, sat on the footpath with them while they were playing. Eventually, he took the child on his scooter, which the nearby people saw and alerted her parents. “She is the only child of her parents. While the father works as a watchman, the mother works as a house help in societies. The parents and the nearby people started searching for the child and unable to find her, they approached us,” senior police inspector Jitendra Sonawane from Taloja Police Station said. The parents approached the police by around 7 pm and reported what had happened.
“Without wasting time on any of the formalities of recording statement or lodging a complaint, Taloja police got into action and started the search. While one team looked into available CCTV footage, one team started the search on the field with the help of a bomb squad,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (Zone II) Pankaj Dahane said.
The team was able to find the registration number of the scooty from CCTV recording and accordingly started looking for the two-wheeler. “The dog squad took us near the railway tracks of the railway carshed. We found the scooty parked near the metro bridge there. A few metres away, we saw the scared child walking in the area between the tracks and the road. We immediately picked her up and handed her over to her parents,” Assistant Police Inspector Sunil Gurav from Taloja police station said.
There was no sign of the accused in the nearby area. The child went through a medical checkup, and she was found to be alright without any kind of abuse. “It was important to nab the accused soon and we continued with our hunt for him and finally at around 4 am on Thursday, he was found at phase II of Taloja, walking towards his home,” Sonawane said. The accused did not reveal the motive behind the abduction. He said the child asked for a chocolate from him and so he bought one for her and took her on a ride and after the two-wheeler ran out of fuel, he abandoned the vehicle and the child and left. The police said that when they tried to corroborate the story with the CCTV footage available, it seemed to be contradictory. The accused, a resident of Taloja Phase I and originally from Bihar, resided with his wife and 18-month-old daughter.
Mahto was arrested under the section of 363 (kidnapping) of the IPC and was produced before the Panvel Judicial Magistrate First Class Court on Thursday and has been remanded to magisterial custody. The accused is currently placed in Taloja jail.