Ranchi, June 15: Illiterate girls have always been easy targets for traffickers. But last month, when a convent-going 14-year-old was picked up by a gang, the usual was not to be. She fought back, was rescued and sent home by the New Delhi police yesterday, after the state police refused to help.

Daisy (not her real name), a Class X student of Seventh-Day Adventist School in Torpa, Khunti, was lured into a trip to New Delhi by her friend Lovlin (20), a dropout from her school.

“On May 6, I was on my way back from school when my friend Lovlin called me home and took me to her uncle Namjan Longa’s house in Khunti. I met Salomi Topno there. Longa and Salomi insisted that I go to Delhi on the evening train with Muskaan, who I knew from before,” Daisy said.

Longa told Daisy it would be a pleasure trip with lots of sightseeing. But when she insisted on speaking to her parents, Longa convinced her that she could call them once they reached Delhi.

Next morning, Muskaan, a middle-aged woman, took her to a “placement agency”, Dolly Enterprises, in Punjabi Bagh. They spent a night there. The following day they left for a house in Miyawalinagar in the Paschim Vihar area of Delhi where she was kept for a week.

“Then Muskaan took me to a house in Janakpuri. There, she met a man and took Rs 11,000 from him and left me there. This is when I realised that I had been sold,” Daisy said.

Daisy worked as a housemaid in the man’s house, who stayed with his family. On May 14, when she got a chance, she used the telephone to call her father. “I told him everything. I also gave him the address of the house in Janakpuri,” she said.

By then, Daisy’s father, who works as a bookseller and is a resident of Ulibagaicha in Khunti, had already begun looking for his missing daughter. He had gone to the Khunti police station to lodge an FIR when she did not return home on May 6. But the officer in charge refused to write the report.

He then contacted the additional chief judicial magistrate (ACJM) of Khunti. But nothing came of it. When Daisy called him, he left for Delhi.

Last Wednesday, he lodged an FIR against Muskaan and Longa in Delhi. The police, along with Delhi-based Socio Legal Information Centre, rescued Daisy and he brought her to Ranchi yesterday.

Muskaan, who is also a resident of Ulibagaicha, was arrested from her agency in Punjabi Bagh, Daisy said.

Now, the Khunti police have lodged an FIR. “I have come to know that the ACJM had ordered the Khunti police to lodge the FIR on June 4,” he said.

When The Telegraph contacted the Khunti police late this evening, they weren’t even aware that Daisy had been rescued. “Longa’s gang has gone into hiding. But, we will hunt them out,” said Shivlal Tudu, the officer in-charge.

About 30,000 girls are trafficked from Jharkhand every year, of which 10 per cent never return. Few like Daisy are educated and have the presence of mind to fight back.