Cop prays in temple to find missing kid

Ignores mother's request to trace boy

As a cop he should ideally have alerted all nearby police stations and launched extensive search operations the moment he received the complaint that a child had gone missing from a temple, but he did not do any such thing.

He, instead, rushed to the temple and resorted to exorcism to trace the child even as the missing child’s distraught mother kept pleading with him and other cops to launch a search for him.

Reports say, a woman had gone with her five year old son to the famous Hulka Devi temple at Orai in Uttar Pradesh’s Jalaun district, about 200 kilometres from here, on Sunday to pay obeisance there on the occasion of the navratra.She was accompanied by another female member of her family.

As there was a huge rush at the temple, the woman asked her niece to take care of the child while she went inside the temple to have darshan (obeisance), sources said.A few minutes later, the niece raised an alarm as the child suddenly went missing. He could not be traced after hours of search in and around the temple.

The woman then approached the nearby Tilak Nagar police outpost in-charge and lodged a complaint in this regard.

The in-charge Sudhakar Kumar, after registering the complaint, came rushing to the temple, sat in front of the deity as if he was meditating and began reciting mantras, reports said.

According to the other devotees, who were there, the cop suddenly started to shake his body as if he had been possessed by some supernatural element.

After a while he turned toward the crying mother and told her that her son would be traced with the help of the goddess and that she need not worry.

Senior police officials said that they had no information about the matter, but added that it would be investigated.

Only a few days back a senior police officer, who had organised a ‘puja’ inside a police station in Kanpur town to bring down the crime graph in his area, had been suspended by the government.