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7 days on, boy’s body found in drain

Last Updated 04 September 2019, 20:17 IST

A five-year-old boy who reportedly slipped into a stormwater drain in western Bengaluru last week was found dead 18 km away near the Global Village Tech Park on Wednesday.

Rescue workers found the highly decomposed body of Mohammed Zain in the drain near the canteen area of the technology park in Kengeri around noon. The body was found floating amid garbage in a downstream part of the drain.

Rescue workers had been searching for the boy since Sunday, a day after his mother, Gulshan (28) lodged a police complaint about his disappearance.

Zain had stepped out of the home on the night of August 29 to throw garbage into the open drain. A 10-year-old girl from a neighbouring house had accompanied him. Fearing reprisals, the girl returned home and didn’t talk to anyone about the incident.

Gulshan, meanwhile, realised that her son was missing and started looking for him with the help of relatives.

Neighbours soon joined the search. The girl, however, maintained silence even when asked what had happened to the boy.

When the jurisdictional JJ Nagar police started investigating the case, they reviewed the CCTV footage of a nearby building, which showed the boy and the girl going together, but only the girl coming back after some time. Questioned by the police, the girl revealed that Zain had slipped into the drain. BBMP officials along with fire and emergency services personnel launched a search operation and combed the drain till Kengeri.

The police, which had earlier taken up a case of kidnap on the basis of the mother’s complaint, has not decided on registering a case of unnatural death. Such accidents are usually classified as unnatural deaths under section 174 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC).

Zain was the eldest of the three children of Gulshan, a single mother who ekes out a living with a tailoring job, and Imran Shariff, a painter who had died from tuberculosis only five months ago. The family lives in a rented house in Arafath Nagar, Padarayanapura.

The family was still coming to terms with Shariff’s death when Zain went missing. After her husband’s death, Gulshan had been doing odd jobs to take care of her three children aged five, three and one, one of her relatives said.

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(Published 04 September 2019, 18:55 IST)

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