This story is from October 15, 2019

UP: Hardoi girl sold for Rs 50,000 five years ago, traced via App

A 14-year-old girl, ditched by her lover while planning to elope, landed in the hands of human traffickers and was sold for Rs 50,000, and lived about 100km away from her native place but couldn’t muster the courage to contact her parents.
UP: Hardoi girl sold for Rs 50,000 five years ago, traced via App
Representative image
LUCKNOW: A 14-year-old girl, ditched by her lover while planning to elope, landed in the hands of human traffickers and was sold for Rs 50,000, and lived about 100 km away from her native place but couldn’t muster the courage to contact her parents.
The girl, now 19, married and mother of a three-year-old daughter, was recovered by the sleuths of the Special Task Force (STF) who traced her via a phone caller identification app.

A case of kidnapping a minor lodged in Hardoi in 2014 was handed over to STF on September 14. The STF recovered the girl from Sitapur on Monday.
A senior STF officer who led the investigation told TOI, “The case was worked out through the ‘Truecaller’ app.
“First, we interrogated three persons arrested by local police when the girl’s parents lodged a named kidnapping complaint. Then we checked around 5,000 calls made on the phones of her parents,” he added.
“We noticed some incoming calls did not mature but were dialed repeatedly in last few months. When we checked the number on the app, the missing girl’s name appeared. We cross-verified the identity, registered SIM address and location with the telecom operator. A team was dispatched to the address mentioned and it traced the girl in Baznagar village under Biswan police station in
Sitapur district.
“The girl cried bitterly when we traced her and narrated her ordeal. She said one Satendra had promised to marry her and promised to elope with her on May 20, 2014, but ditched her at the last moment. Satendra had asked her to come to the railway station to elope to Kanpur, but he did not turn up himself. In a state of shock, she boarded a train to Kanpur. At Kanpur station, she met one Jhankar who sold her to one Narendra of Sitapur for Rs 50,000. Narendra married her to his son Anand,” said SSP, STF, Rajeev Mishra.
She remembered her mother’s number and dialled it many times, but couldn’t muster the courage to talk to her and always disconnected the call when it started ringing.
“The girl’s statement will be recorded under section 164 of CrPC and the court will decide her fate,” said Mishra.
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