The Kolar women police on Friday traced a four-year-old boy who had gone missing mysteriously from Rahmatnagar in Kolar on Thursday.
The boy, one of three children of Salma, who worked at an incense stick factory, was in the washroom of the house close to the factory from where he ventured out and started walking. He reached Arahalli gate playfully and until then, no one paid attention to him. Upon reaching Arahalli, the boy panicked and started crying.
Bus to Palamaner
A passerby noticed him and asked about his parents. The boy was hardly able to speak, but remembered his grandfather’s town of Palamaner in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh. Thinking that he had come from Palamaner, the man spoke to the bus driver and conductor of Palamaner bus and got the boy into the bus .
The bus reached Palamaner and the conductor, without knowing what to do, handed over the boy to a hotel owner at the bus stand, asking him hand over the boy to his family if they come searching for him.
Meanwhile, the family had realised that the boy was missing and searched the entire area before filing a complaint with the women’s police station. Inspector B. Shankarachar and team swung into action and looked for the CCTV footage only to find that the area did not have any.
The police came up with a Plan B and made announcements in mosques and dargahs and started sharing the boy’s details on WhatsApp groups asking people to share it as much as possible.
Their efforts met with success as some people who had seen the boy in the hotel alerted the police number mentioned on WhatsApp. The police with the help of people who informed them got the photos of the boy on the phone and confirmed the same with the parents.
A team of police rushed to Palamaner and alerted the child’s grandfather to reach the hotel and brought him back to Kolar to be reunited with the family.
Social media
“It was with social media and public support that we could manage to crack the case. Luckily, the boy had not fallen into the hands of anti social elements,” Mr. Shankarachar told The Hindu.
M. Narayana , Superintendent of Police, Kolar, appreciated the police team for cracking the missing boy’s case in record time.
Previous case
This is is the second such case cracked by the women’s police team since October. The same team of police, in five hours, tracked down a woman and her daughter for kidnapping a new born baby from the district hospital and taking it to Tamil Nadu.
