PUNE: A 20-year-old woman from Warje was
booked on Tuesday for allegedly abducting her neighbour’s 10-month-old
baby boy, who she had taken along on the pretext of buying biscuits on Monday evening.
Inspector Prakash Khandekar of the Warje Malwadi police told TOI that the police have sent two teams to trace the woman and the abducted baby, Shreyas.
“Our priority is to rescue the baby safely from the clutches of the woman, for which we have sent one team to the suspect’s native place,” he said.
Khandekar said prima facie
probe has revealed that the suspect was separated from her husband as the couple was childless. “We suspect that she may have abducted the boy to satisfy her urge for a child,” the officer said.
The boy’s mother, Manisha Bharati, said the woman was staying with her uncle and aunt at Ramnagar in Warje for the past one-and-a-half-year. “She used to work as a domestic help in Warje. I knew her as the relative of our neighbours,” she said.
The mother said, “Around 6pm on Monday, the woman came to my house and asked for ‘alata’, red colour applied on the feet. Since I did not have it, I told her to wait at home and went out to borrow it from one of our neighbours.”
After returning home after some time, Bharati gave alata to the woman. “All this while my son was playing inside the house. Suddenly, she requested me to allow her to take my son to a nearby shop as she wanted to buy biscuits for him,” the mother said, adding that she allowed the woman to take her son as she did not suspect anything then.
When the woman did not return after five minutes, Bharati sent her elder daughter to the shop. “A little later, my daughter came running home and told me that neither the woman nor Shreyas was there at the shop,” Bharati said, adding that they tried to locate the woman and also visited her aunt’s house but to no avail.
“When the woman’s aunt called her on the cellphone, she told her that she would return within half-an-hour,” Bharati said, adding that the woman switched off her cellphone after some time, following which she lodged a police complaint.
Bharati’s husband, Surendra, works at a flour mill.