Miscreants’ abduction bid foiled by local residents

A girl was attacked and molested on her way to school at Malda’s Kaliachak. She was surrounded by a gang of miscreants who tried to abduct her from the spot.

The girl screamed as the locals rushed to the spot. The miscreants decamped from there. But they hurt the girl on her legs and chest before going at large.

The victim girl was taken to Malda Medical College and Hospital.

Police said that the victim girl used to go to school alone. “Those youth have been following me for some days. I did not react to them. But on Thursday, those people attacked me. They hurt me and threatened to traffic me to other states. They would have abducted me if those villagers did not come in time,” said the victim girl.

Police started an investigation after getting the complaint from the girl’s mother. “Those youth are residents of Gharialchawk. They will soon be arrested,” a police officer said.

The trafficking of minor girls in Malda was frequent. A district police report said that 1,170 girls who had gone missing between January and November in 2010 from Malda have not been traced yet. A total of 1,247 missing diaries had been lodged with police in this period, of which police have managed to successfully trace only 77 girls.

“We are suspecting that those youth who were trying to abduct the girl were members of a girl trafficking racket. They were a local body. We’ll do portrait parle of those youth,” said a police officer.

In another case, a girl went missing from her house from a village in Rajnagar following which her father, a daily wage earner, lodged a police complaint the next day.

In his complaint, the victim’s father alleged that one of his distant relatives and his wife Kakali - had taken advantage of the family’s poverty-stricken condition and forcibly taken the girl to Mumbai to get her married to a wealthy man.

Police had then registered a missing diary.