Man who kidnapped girl 10 years ago held

GURGAON: A 30-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the alleged trafficking of a city woman, who was kidnapped as a Class VI girl in 2008 and sold off to a man in Uttar Pradesh, forcing her to spend 10 years in captivity before she could flee back to her parents in Gurgaon last month.
Pushpender was rounded up by Gurgaon cops in Noida on Thursday, three days after the woman, who is now 21 years and the mother of a one-and-a-half-year-old girl, filed a complaint at Rajendra Park police station on Monday.

Police said Pushpender was one of the three men, also including middleman Santosh and her husband Ashok Tiwari, named in the FIR. Preliminary probe revealed that it was Pushpender, alias Teka, who had kidnapped her and taken to Etah in UP.

He used to live as a tenant opposite the girl's house near Dhanwapur village in Gurgaon's Sector 104 in 2008. She used to call him 'mama' as he was from her mother's village in Etah. Working on this clue, the Gurgaon police traced down Pushpender's family in the Etah village and found out his current whereabouts.


Police said he had left Gurgaon after kidnapping the girl and moved to Noida, where he has been staying all these years.

In her complaint, the woman said that Pushpender had left her alone at a bus stand at Etah. From there, Santosh took her to his house in Agra and later allegedly sold her to Ashok Tiwari, a resident of Dehalia village in Etah. Ashok forcibly married her. She spent around seven years in captivity at Ashok's Dehalia house, facing regular physical and sexual abuse. She was mostly kept confined to a room locked from outside.

In 2015, Tiwari shifted to Greater Noida and took up guard's job at a private hospital. He brought her along. Tiwari also allowed her to go to work, and she landed an attendant's job at the same hospital. In August 2016, she gave birth to a girl. Finally, she took help of a co-worker, who got her to talk to her elder brother over phone on December 20. On December 24, her family took her back to Gurgaon along with her daughter.

Police said that they had got the woman's medical examination done and recorded her statement in front of a magistrate.

"One person has been arrested and we are trying to trace the two others," said police PRO Ravinder Kumar.