Seven-year-old Rumana, five-year-old Raja and four-year-old Sanya, abandoned by their father, were found thanks to Twitter.
Twitter came to the rescue of three little children, apparently abandoned by their father Tuesday evening at the busy New Delhi Railway Station.
The children were later reunited with their mother. Police are investigating the children's' abandonment.
Police were were alerted when a tweet about the children started trending yesterday evening. A member of the public tweeted that the scared children, all under the age of 10, were seen huddled together on platform 16 of the railway station. "Plz (sic) help urgently," the tweet said. The children were untraceable for an agonizing thirty minutes from when the police started looking for them. They were finally spotted on platform number one.
Seven-year-old Rumana, five-year-old Raja and four-year-old Sanya were sobbing uncontrollably, and were too scared and bewildered to tell police how they got to the station three kilometers from home. After reassuring them and giving them something to eat, the police pieced together that the children's father had suddenly shown up in the evening and taken them to the railway station. "Stay here till your mother finds you," he is supposed to have told them when he left them there.
The children also managed to tell the police where they lived and guided them to their home. When police knocked on the door of their one-room house in Nabi Karim, the children's' mother had clearly been asleep. "You're here sleeping and you don't know your kids are missing?" a policeman asked her.
The children's' mother, 37-year-old Tabussum, said she came home from work, didn't see the children, briefly looked for them and fell asleep. "I didn't report it, that was my mistake," said Tabassum. Turns out, the mother of seven, who's estranged from her husband, often finds the children aren't home when she gets back from work. Her Kanpur-based husband takes them away and drops them back without informing her. Four of Tabassum's children live with her husband and she moved to Delhi a month ago with her three other children.
The Railway Protection Force took Tabassum's statement when they handed the children back to her. They will continue to investigate and may call the father for questioning.