A nine-year-old girl who went missing from Banaswadi on Saturday evening was brought to the City on Sunday by three men who said they picked her up in V Kota, Andhra Pradesh, where they found her crying.
But the middle-aged man who had reportedly abducted Nikitha, a class 3 student, from A K Colony in Dodda Banaswadi is untraceable. Police said the suspect had accompanied the three men while returning to the City but fled midway.
The suspect abducted the girl when she was going to buy chocolates near her house around 6.30 pm on Saturday. He claimed to have two names — Pradeep and Pramod — and wore a cap and white shirt, Nikitha told the police. He spoke Telugu.
“The man stopped me midway, saying he wanted to gift my mother a sari. At first, he took me to some place and from there to K R Puram by bus,” Nikitha told Deccan Herald. “He said my mother and sister were in hospital after an accident and that he was taking me there.”
Thereafter, the man and Nikitha boarded a bus to Andhra Pradesh and sat in the last row. “I pleaded with him to let me see my mother. But he asked me to keep quiet, saying we would reach hospital soon,” she recalled.
Then they got down at V Kota where he gave her idli-vada. Thereafter, he took her to a house in a remote place. “It was pitch dark there. Stones and other materials were dumped there and a few men were inside,” Nikitha recounted. “All of a sudden, he took me out of the house and from there to the bus stand, saying those men were thieves. I just cried.”
“But he asked me to shut up or else he would die or run away. So I kept quiet,” she added. At the bus stand, he told her to identify him as her father if someone asked, and went away only to return after a while.
As Nikitha wept, Shankar, a driver, and his two friends asked her what was happening. She said the man was her father and they wanted to go to Bangalore.
Shankar offered to drop them off in Bangalore. Thus, all got into his vehicle, police explained. According to Shankar, he had no reason to suspect the man.
But things became clear when the man got down at Narasapura near Kolar, saying he had to answer the call of nature. But when he didn’t return, Shankar grew suspicious and enquired with Nikitha who narrated her ordeal.
Realising the gravity of the matter, the trio dropped Nikitha off at Banaswadi where she had a happy reunion with her parents, Srinivas and Prabhavathi, police said. Srinivas suspected it could be the handiwork of an unidentified autorickshaw driver who tried to abduct his daughter two months ago. Nikitha said she could identify the man if she saw him again.