Mumbai:
A day after they released CCTV footage from the city's biggest train station which shows a man kidnapping a three-year-old girl, the Mumbai Police has stepped up its efforts to nab the kidnapper and locate the missing child.
The footage from Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) shows how a man gets off a train, wanders around the waiting room of the station, spots a family with a sleeping baby, sits beside her and then disappears with the child; all this in less than five minutes. The police say he later boarded a train for Nagpur with the child. According to the police, the incident took place on June 10 around 2 am.
Senior Inspector of Police Surendra Deshmukh (phone number- 022-22620173) told NDTV, "We appeal to all viewers to help us with information to catch the culprit. This is the reason for releasing this footage to you. We have clues and we are working on it. But unless and until we reach the child and the kidnapper, there is nothing we can say."
The police say, the child's parents were contract labourers from Parbhani district in Vidarbha who cleaned the railway tracks. They were returning back home but missed their train and decided to spend the night at the station itself. The police have registered a case of kidnapping and are looking for the accused, who was seen limping in the video, and is reportedly aged between 25 to 30 years. The police say his gait may help people identify him.
Over 60,000 children disappear each year in India - that's one child every eight minutes or seven every hour. Most of these children are abducted by gangs involved in trafficking. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, over two lakh children are listed as missing in India.
But this audacious crime at one of the most heavily guarded railway stations has shocked the citizens of Mumbai. "The security personnel need to be alert. They need to be alert at any point of day at any point of time. But that's the deficiency," Harish Shah, a student who takes a train from the CST everyday, told NDTV.
But not all commuters blame authorities. Many pointed out parents have to take responsibility for their children. One commuter told NDTV, "Police are doing their work. People should be more careful and alert about their own security especially while travelling with their children."