Two-month-old rescued in suspected child trafficking case

PATIALA: In a suspected case of child trafficking, Childline NGO's team of the district on Monday recovered a 2-month-old girl from a 28-year-old woman in Samana, who was allegedly trying to sell her.

District coordinator of ChildLine, Baljit Kaur, said they had received a tip-off on Monday morning that a woman named Gurpreet Kaur was trying to sell a 2-month-old girl. She said they immediately got in touch with the district police and constituted a joint team, which went to Samana and contacted the accused. After initial reluctance and changing the meeting venue thrice, Gurpreet finally met Baljit where her team along with a cop, who was dressed in civvies, recovered the girl and took them to the Samana city police station.

Baljit who works on a special project of the union ministry of women and child development and operates a helpline for children in distress, said initially the women refused to share details about the biological parents of the girl, but when the police intervened, she told them that the girl was born as a twin and her mother was having a medical condition. She claimed since the family could not afford to bring up the child, they had given her for adoption.

However, she could not produce any documents to corroborate her facts or call the biological parents of the girl. However, she claimed that her parents lived in a village near Sirhind and that she would produce them before the cops on Tuesday morning.

SHO city police station Samana Surinder Bhalla said no case has been registered in this regard as they were still verifying the facts. He said while the girl’s biological parents had not yet been traced, but they would investigate the matter further before a case is registered in this regard.

Meanwhile, Baljit contended that if Gurpreet was not hiding anything, why she kept changing the venue of their meeting. “The manner in which she was acting caused suspicion and the fact that the girl’s biological parents have not yet been traced and there were no documents to support the adoption claims being made by her were ground enough to prove that the girl was being trafficked,” she said.