JOIN USTwo children were reunited with their families in Operation Milaap team’s very-first visit to a children’s home in west Delhi’s Prahladpur Bangar. Their families said they had assumed them to be dead till they received calls from Crime Branch officials.
Police said one child had been living at the home for 20 days and the other for over one month.
“We managed to gather details from them about their families within a few hours,” said a police officer directly involved in the operation.
Crime Branch Inspector Vipin Bhatia, Assistant Sub-Inspector Ravinder Singh and Head Constable Balwinder Singh were part of the team that examined the children lodged at Bal Adhikar Sashaktikaran Kendra children’s home on Thursday.
While one 13-year-old boy was found to have run away from his uncle’s home in Rajasthan to escape studies, a 10-year-old Delhi boy had left his home to see the Red Fort. They both were picked up by authorities near Old Delhi railway station and sent to this home.
“The 13-year-old boy first appeared nervous but divulged his mother’s name and her phone number under sustained compassionate persuasion,” said police.Ran away from home
His mother who arrived from her hometown in Bhiwadi to collect the boy told officials that he had run away from home on being rebuked by his aunt for his poor performance in studies.
Local police had registered a case of kidnapping. He had arrived at Gurgaon by a bus and then reached Kashmere Gate bus stand on August 31. He had been loitering around in Delhi for three months before being sent to the children’s home.
“My wife had scolded him for taking more interest in sports at the cost of his studies,” the boy’s uncle said on Thursday.
The other boy, meanwhile, had left his home in east Delhi’s Partap Nagar with a friend of the same age to see the Red Fort on November 12.
“The friend left him mid-way and returned home but this boy continued on his quest. But he was unable to find his way home after visiting the Red Fort,” said Dinesh Kumar Gupta, DCP (Crime).
When the police team tried to meet him, he tried desperately to hide in a room.“He was reluctant to talk for a long time even after we managed to get access to him,” said Bhatia.
Police finally managed to get him to blurt out his father’s name and address of his colony. Police rushed to the locality and traced his father there.
“We had lost all hopes of finding our son. Frequent reports in newspapers of children being killed in Delhi had led us to believe that our son was dead too,” said the father of the boy who studies at a madrasa in Wazirabad.