Gujarat: Rape convict who kidnapped student detained from Himachal

On August 12, 2018, Trivedi had allegedly kidnapped an 18-year-old woman who had joined his coaching centre in Choital town. After Gujarat police could not trace the woman and Trivedi for months, the woman’s father had moved the Gujarat High Court with a habeas corpus petition and had also pleaded that the investigation be handed over to the CBI. The HC had granted the plea to transfer the probe to the CBI in April 2019.

Meanwhile, in June this year, the woman had returned to her home in Chotila with an 11-year-old child believed to have been fathered by 48-year-old Trivedi.

The CBI sources said that Trivedi was hiding in Punjab. “He is quite fluent in Punjabi. He was hiding in Ludhiana under the garb of a Sardarji. He was living in a local Gurdwara and was teaching students. We had got information about his whereabouts in Ludhiana in May. Ludhiana police had raided a premises on May 14 only to find out that Trivedi had left that place the previous evening,” sources further said.

Earlier, Trivedi had allegedly kidnapped two minor girls from a private school in Padadhari taluka of Rajkot district in July 2012. He was the principal of that school. After managing to remain in hiding for two years, he was arrested by Punjab police from Budhlada town in Mansa district and the girls were also rescued. He was charged of rape, rape of minors and abduction by the Criminal Investigation Department (Crime) of Gujarat.

A special court in Rajkot had convicted Trivedi of these charges and sentenced him to life imprisonment in March, 2018. However, in August that year, he walked out of jail on parole and jumped it. While on the run after jumping parole, he set up a coaching centre in Chotila and eloped with the 18-year-old woman.

Based on a complaint filed by the woman’s father at the Chotial police station, police had booked Trivedi under IPC Section 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing woman to compel her marriage, etc). “We had tried to ascertain paternity of the child the woman returned with but those efforts had remained unsuccessful as we didn’t have Trivedi’s DNA samples and his close relatives had sought time before they could give their DNA samples. But now that Trivedi has been caught, we will go ahead with this test,” CBI officers said.