Sitapur cops bust trafficking racket, rescue minor girl
LUCKNOW: The Sitapur police busted a state-wide human trafficking racket and rescued a 16-yearold Kushinagar girl on Monday night.
The cops also arrested a woman, who had brought the girl to Sitapur on assurance of a job, and was planning to sell her into the flesh trade for ₹ 1.5 lakh.
The woman named Kalpati, a resident of Sitapur’s Ramkot area, was arrested from a hotel room in Sitapur when the police team raided it on a tip off by a social activist. While the cops rescued the girl, the people who had come to buy her managed to escape.
LUCKNOW: The Sitapur police busted a state-wide human trafficking racket and rescued a 16-yearold Kushinagar girl on Monday night.
The cops also arrested a woman, who had brought the girl to Sitapur on assurance of a job, and was planning to sell her into the flesh trade for ₹ 1.5 lakh.
The woman named Kalpati, a resident of Sitapur’s Ramkot area, was arrested from a hotel room in Sitapur when the police team raided it on a tip off by a social activist. While the cops rescued the girl, the people who had come to buy her managed to escape.
“So far the probe has revealed that the arrested woman has a state-wide network and many other people are involved in it,” said Akash Kulkarni, superintendent of police (SP), Sitapur, while talking to HT over phone.
He said the woman has confessed to selling at least five-six girls to flesh trade racketeers in the past one year. “The police are trying to trace those girls,” he stated.
Kulkarni said a police team, including a deputy superintendent of police, is hunting for the other gang members.
He said the rescued girl told cops that she is an orphan and met Kalpati on a railway station in Kushinagar a few days ago. “Kalpati assured her a good lifestyle and a job while bringing her to Sitapur,” he said and added that the girl somehow sensed her evil intentions and shared her concern with a social activist travelling with them in the bus.
The SP said the social activist tipped off the police about the hotel near Mandi Chowki in Sitapur city where the girl had been brought for sale.
He said police also had inputs about some people, from different places, staying in the same hotel for the deal. “The girl was rescued just before she could be sold off,” he said.
Kulkarni said efforts are on to track the girl’s relatives so that she could be reunited with them.