Nashik rural police bust gang trafficking minor girls, 5 held

NASHIK: The Nashik rural police have arrested five people, including three women, in connection with a case of kidnapping a 14-year-old girl from Ozar and selling her in Madhya Pradesh.
The girl’s parents had lodged a complaint with the Ozar police on July 23 stating that their daughter had been abducted by some unidentified people. After the FIR was lodged, the Ozar police started the investigation and eventually traced the missing girl to a village in Khargon of Madhya Pradesh on Monday afternoon.
Sachin Patil, the Nashik Rural SP, said, “There is a racket operating at a bigger level to mislead girls from poor families and then sell them off in other states for money. We are investigating the case.”
The investigating team, while checking CCTV footage of the Mumbai-Agra highway stretch near Ozar spotted one woman taking the victim along with her. The police tracked down the woman’s identity and found out that she was a resident of Ozar. The police detained and questioned the woman — who identified herself as Priyanka Patil — a resident of the same locality as the 14-year-old missing girl. She told the police that she and another woman called Ratna Koli, of Niphad, had sold the girl to a third woman named Surekhabai Bhila, a resident of Shirpur in Dhule.
The police then detained Koli and Bhila and they said the girl had been sent to Gujarat, where she would be married off. Though the police team rushed to Gujarat, they did not find the girl there. But they got the information that the victim was in a particular village in MP’s Khargon district. The police team immediately went to the concerned village. They detained two men — Nanuram Mansare and Govind Mansare — from whom the girl was rescued on Monday.
On Tuesday, all five detainees were formally arrested. “We are trying to find out the other crimes committed by the arrested people. Those arrested have said that they had kidnapped a few other girls in the past. However giving out more details about them would be inappropriate as the information might jeopardise the safety of those victims,” said SP Sachin Patil.