MEERUT: A woman, in her late 30s, from Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut, who went missing and was claimed to have been kidnapped over two years ago, was finally found living in Gujarat’s Surat. It took the local cops two complainants, two court orders and over 25 months to realise that the two suspects – one of them got bail after a year in jail while the other remains behind bars – were innocent.
Meanwhile, the woman, in her statement to court, claimed that she had disappeared on her own will and doesn't want to press charges against anyone.
A resident of Loni area in Ghaziabad, the woman got married to Gajendra Singh, a cab driver in Meerut, in 2002. In December 2018, her mother approached police claiming that her daughter had gone missing and feared that she might have been kidnapped.
The local police waited for another year and a court order before an FIR was registered.
According to police, in October 2019, an FIR of kidnapping based on the mother’s complaint was registered at TP Nagar police station in Meerut against three suspects, including two relatives of the missing woman, following the court order.
The victim’s two relatives were arrested and sent to jail. While Sachin, one of the jailed relatives, secured bail, the other, Om Prakash, continues to be behind bars.
With no clue to the missing woman, police also filed a charge-sheet in the case in March 2020.
However, as the woman was not found even over two years after her disappearance, her husband, Gajendra Singh, approached the Allahabad high court on January 5 this year and alleged that “no efforts were made to trace her by the local police”.
“The court directed police to recover the woman and file an affidavit within a month,” TP Nagar SHO Vijay Gupta said.
When the police finally traced her to Gujarat’s Surat, they got to know she wasn’t kidnapped at all and had disappeared on her own will.
Police have now begun the process to expunge charges against the accused, two of whom have spent a year each in jail while one of them continues to languish there.