Baby Falak case: Agent who sold toddler's mother claims he did not know she had three children

New Delhi: Baby Falak, who is fighting for survival at the AIIMS trauma Centre in Delhi, continues to remain critical and on life-support. Doctors now fear that while Falak may survive, she may have suffered permanent brain damage.

On Tuesday, Falak's mother Munni was reunited with her elder daughter - three-year-old Sanobar, who she last saw four months ago. Her son remains missing. And she is yet to meet her youngest daughter, christened Falak by her care-givers, a baby who India checks in on every day.

22-year-old Munni was brought to Delhi on Monday after a police search that lasted several weeks, ending in Rajasthan, where she lived with her second husband, a man she was sold to for two lakhs. Munni was 16 when she was married to a petty criminal in Bihar. After they had three children, he walked out on his family. An acquaintance promised Munni a job if she moved to Delhi. So she moved to the capital only to discover that the job on offer was prostitution. A group of six people who Munni encountered appear to have been involved in human trafficking, though the police will not say this on record just yet.

When Munni turned down their requests to become a sex worker, Kanta and Lakshmi persuaded her to marry a man in Rajasthan. They offered to look after her children while she began her new married life. Soon, they promised, her husband would accept her children and she could take them to Rajasthan. That was few months ago.

NDTV spoke to the agent who sold Baby Falak's mother. He said she had been introduced as Sunita. He claims to have  no idea about her three children and says he  was made to believe she was unmarried.

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Lakshmi deposited Sanobar with a relative in Bihar. It's not clear yet where the little boy was sent. And Falak was passed around among different adults. Her journey stopped temporarily with a man named Rajkumar, who had eloped with a teenager. The young girl had been initiated as a sex worker by the same group that Munni had encountered. Rajkumar was already married and took off a few months ago to meet his wife in Mumbai. It was the desperate and alienated teen who the police say tortured the young baby that she was now forced to look after alone. Falak's head was smashed against a wall, a clothes iron was switched on and placed on her face, she was bitten. On January 18, the teen walked into Delhi's AIIMS hospital and asked for help. Officials there felt her story that the baby had fallen from her bed were not true, and the teen was placed in a juvenile home.

Munni was interviewed  by child welfare officials, and granted custody of Sanobar.  Police officials  say they will consider DNA tests to confirm that Munni is indeed Falak's biological mother.  

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