Baby kidnapped from street-dweller’s family, rescued after 13 hrs

CHENNAI: A 10-month-old male baby was kidnapped on the South Mint Road near the Central railway station from a street-dweller family early in the morning and recovered after almost 13 hours on Sunday.
Latha (20) was shocked when her husband Anand (23) woke her up at 3.30 am to tell her that their child Agilan was missing.

“We live in a joint family of more than 20 people,” said Nagamuthu, one of the eldest members of the family. “We have a small house in Kannagi Nagar but we earn our livelihood from the push-carts we own.” He added that the family stays on the pavement on South Mint Road opposite the Rajiv Gandhi government hospital and they go home only when there is heavy rain.

According to Nagamuthu, on Saturday night, they were, as usual, sleeping on the platform under the carts. Several neighbours had left the place much earlier to attend a temple festival nearby.
Latha, her two sons - three-year-old and 10-month-old - and Nagamuthu were all fast asleep. “I saw someone walking away from our spot,” Nagamuthu recollected. “Since my vision is poor, I could not recognize the woman and so, I did not know that she was taking away our kid.”

When Anand came back from the temple festival, he found the baby missing and woke up Latha. The couple immediately alerted their neighbours.

As they were searching for the kid, an auto-driver Ezhumalai near the Central station said that he had dropped three women at the Adyar depot around the same time when the baby was kidnapped.
Further inquiry revealed that the woman, who had kidnapped the baby, was joined by two other women who hired the auto. “They asked me to drop them in Kannagi Nagar but since the fare was high, they told me to go to the Adyar depot,” said Ezhumalai.

“Since the CCTV camera near the hospital was not working, it was initially difficult for us to trace the woman until the auto driver volunteered to help in the investigation,” said Inspector Julius Caesar who was the part of the search team.

According to the police, the CCTV cameras in the Adyar depot recorded the movement of the women, which matched the description given by the auto-driver. The search led the police team under Inspector Ravi to the women in question in Kannagi Nagar where the baby was recovered from one Savitha. The police said the woman was being interrogated to find any links with a kidnapping gang.

In a similar incident nine months ago, two kids from the platform were kidnapped and their whereabouts are still unknown. In February, a nine-month-old girl baby went missing at Walltax Road. On April 3, a street-dweller Metha’s eight-month-old child Rokesh was missing.