Nov. 8: A 14-year-old girl trafficked from East Midnapore has been found dead in Panipat, with police saying many more girls from Bengal are likely to have fallen victim to the gang running the racket.

Parvati Daloi from Marishda near Contai, 170km from Calcutta, was probably electrocuted, said a Haryana police officer from Panipat. But he added that murder could not be ruled out.

Main accused Golok Das, who runs the Atul Placement Agency in south Delhi’s Chirag Dilli, surrendered to Panipat police tonight after several days in hiding.

“He lured children, or trafficked them with the knowledge of their impoverished parents in exchange for a little money. He then ‘placed’ them in households looking for child domestic hands,” said an officer of Delhi police who, too, were looking for Das.

In East Midnapore alone, the police have received two formal and another 11 “informal” complaints against Das’s agents.

Bengal is second worst on the human trafficking list, behind only Bihar.

“The girl’s body was found on November 2. She may have died in an accident, or she may have been murdered,” a senior officer said from Panipat, 90km from Delhi.

Parvati had gone missing from her home in Seulbarh village on July 5, her father had said in his first information report. The police would not say if the agents interacted only with her or paid her parents.

A police team from East Midnapore, along with the girl’s father and activists of a local NGO, reached Delhi today and travelled to Panipat to see the body. The police took along Das’s father, a fellow accused who was arrested in Bengal earlier, to Panipat, too.

Activists of the NGO Kajla Jan Kalyan Samiti and its partner, Save the Children, said Das had earlier called up a KJKS member and tried to bribe him to “keep quiet”.

“We refused the Rs 5-lakh bribe and Das’s offer that he would fly the girl’s body back home in a casket,” an activist said.

“We will probe the other cases (of children allegedly trafficked by Das) and rescue these children, too,” said Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, a sub-divisional police officer from East Midnapore.

The NGO alleged that officers at the Marishda police station had at first refused to register the complaint from Parvati’s parents. “It was only after the SDPO intervened that the police took up the case,” an activist said.

East Midnapore police have registered a case of abduction and sexual assault against Das.

Last month, a 13-year-old from North 24-Parganas had revealed how she was “sold” in Ahmedabad for Rs 30,000 after which she was taken from town to town in Gujarat and forced to take up to three clients a day.