BAREILLY: For eight months, an agonised father, a local BJP leader from UP’s Sambhal, had been staging a protest outside the office of the senior superintendent of police (SSP) in Moradabad, demanding police search for his 13-year-old daughter who had gone missing.
On Tuesday, police rescued the child, now seven months pregnant, from Moradabad where she had been held captive allegedly by another local BJP worker that the family was acquainted with.
The accused, Vishnu Sharma, a BJP booth president in his late twenties, kept shifting base to evade arrest, said police. The girl, a student of class 8, was reunited with her family while Sharma was arrested.
The girl was living at her grandparents’ house when she went missing in January. Her father suspected that Sharma had something to do with it since he had gone into hiding soon after the incident. He had earlier told TOI that he had named Sharma in his complaint, but cops were “taking too long to act against him”.
In July, the Moradabad SSP formed five teams to search for the girl and the case was handed to the Sambhal crime branch to speed up the investigation process.
Circle officer (Civil Lines), Moradabad, Indu Siddhartha said the girl was sent for medical examination which revealed that she was seven months pregnant. “In her statement to the court, she said that she was held captive by Sharma,” said the CO.
The accused, meanwhile, said that he was “married” to the girl and he believed her to be 21. He has been booked under section 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing woman to compel her marriage), 376 (punishment for rape) of the Indian Penal Code and relevant provisions of the Pocso (prevention of children from sexual offences) Act.
