Four days after she was snatched away from her mother’s arms, eight-month-old Sragvi was rescued by police on Wednesday from a house at Trimulgherry after arresting the abductor.
Though the arrest of the kidnapper, Ravula Bharath, brought an end to the sensational “snatching of baby from mother on the bustling Shivam Road in Amberpet”, police are clueless about the motive behind it.
Motive not known
“The motive is being investigated. Further interrogation and verification will be done to ascertain facts,” Hyderabad Police Commissioner Anurag Sharma said at a press conference.
Bharath, working with a pharmaceutical company, was a classmate of Sragvi’s mother T. Sujana at the MBA college and a family friend. He was depressed after his wife divorced him. Bharath had no children and was craving to bring up a child.
Sujana was on her way back to her house at Prashanthnagar on Shivam Road from Tilaknagar after taking the baby to a doctor when the bike-borne Bharath came. Carrying the baby in her arms, Sujana got off the auto-rickshaw and was about to cross the road when the accused grabbed Sragvi and sped away. Though abduction of infants and children is not unusual, investigators are baffled as this was a rare case of the kidnapper taking away a baby from her mother. Initially they hoped to crack the case by analysing traffic and private surveillance camera footage. However, the cameras did not capture the images of suspects anywhere except that of Sujana walking towards an autorickshaw at Tilaknagar. Nearly 20 minutes later, the baby was snatched away from her.
Police are clueless about the reasons behind the abduction as no calls for ransom were made. Bharath was nabbed by a special team of the Hyderabad Central Crime Station on a tip-off.
They found that Bharath had taken the baby to his house at Trimulgherry and had hired a woman to look after the infant.
