A team of seven police officers of the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit (AHTU) of West district got together last year and made it their mission to reunite missing and kidnapped children with their parents. They have managed to reunite 54 of them so far as a part of ‘Operation Muskan’.
In 2008, a two and a half month old infant Sabir was kidnapped from his residence in Nihal Vihar.
A year later, the case was transferred to West district’s AHTU and the investigation was taken up by Sub-Inspector Ashok Kumar who managed to trace the accused kidnapper Ashraful to West Bengal and later arrested Sukrana Bibi from Shastri Nagar who had asked Ashraful to kidnap the child because she did not have any child. In May 2016, Sabir was finally reunited with his parents.
This was a first of the many more reunions. After this successful incident, district Deputy Commissioner of Police Vijay Kumar, on the suggestion of Sub-Inspector Ashok, decided to dedicate a special team for such works. A team comprising SI Ashok, Inspector Vijay Pal Singh, SI Omvir, Assistant Sub-Inspectors Phool Singh, Sheo Ram and Sube Singh, and Constable Vikram came into being in March 2017.
Simple means
The team used very simple means to track the children. However, it needed a lot of legwork. “We visited over 60 children homes in Delhi, Haryana and parts of Uttar Pradesh and got the children’s record from them, spoke to the children there who gave us little or no information about themselves or their parents,” said Inspector Vijay.
Next, the officers checked the collected photographs and details with a central record-keeping system called Zonal Integrated Police Network (ZIPNET) and trackthemissingchild.gov.in at the website of Ministry of Women and Child Development. The officers managed to unite children from various States including Delhi (27), Haryana (7), Uttar Pradesh (8), Madhya Pradesh (2), Bihar (2), West Bengal (7), and Rajasthan (1) who had been missing or kidnapped for as long as 10 years.
Hurdles faced
When questioned about the hurdles during the operation, Constable Vikram said that they were often turned away by children homes who asked them to bring letters from the Child Welfare Committee office concerned to see the records.
“We would tell them that we are from Delhi Police but they would demand the letter, then it would take a day or two for the letter to come. We have often spent days in police station of other States if the procedure took long,” he said.
