City police on Monday found a 17-year-old girl who had gone missing from her home in Pudupet over two weeks ago.
The teenager had kept the police on their toes and made it difficult for them to locate her by frequently changing mobiles phone numbers.
According to police, the girl had completed class X and then remained at home. She lived with her parents in Labbai Street, Pudupet. Her parents wanted her to continue with her studies and kept insisting on this. Frustrated, she left home one day and did not return.
Her family searched for her everywhere, and when they could not find her, they filed a police complaint.
The police began their investigation by tracking her mobile phone. “At first, the signal revealed that she was near Nagore Dargah. But before we could get to Nagore, she had left. Over the following days, the signal from her phone came from several different places including Coimbatore, Kovalam and Coonoor,” said a police officer.
Based on her call records, the police then interrogated some of her friends.
“Some of them told us that she had called them, but they did not know where she was. So we instructed them to pass on any information they got about her whereabouts to us,” said the officer.
On Sunday, one of the teenager’s friends called the police and said she was coming to Chennai on Monday morning from Coimbatore by train and was then planning to go to Singapore. She had used someone else’s number to make the call. When the police called that number, the person who answered told them that the girl who had used his phone was travelling in the unreserved compartment.
“We did not know where she was going to alight. So we posted police personnel at Tambaram, Perambur, Egmore and Central railway stations. To identify the girl, we made sure members of her family were with the police at all the stations,” said the officer.
On Monday morning, the police spotted the teenager at Central station. “We reunited her with her parents,” said the officer.
Later on Monday, her parents thanked the city police commissioner.
