Bhubaneswar, April 19: Much like the character played by Vidya Balan in the recent hit Kahaani, Binodini Pradhan has travelled to a different city to look for her missing husband and has been knocking on the doors of police stations in the city to help her find him.

Sambalpur-based Binodini says her husband, Biswonath Pradhan, was picked up by the Cuttack-Bhubaneswar police five days ago in connection with the Mancheswar shooting incident. But the police deny having any knowledge of Biswonath’s whereabouts.

With the police refusing to help her, Binodini has approached the State Human Rights Commission alleging illegal detention by the city police.

Binodini, her husband and their nine-year-old son live in Sambalpur. Binodini says that last Sunday, two people came to their house looking for her husband. “We were having lunch around 2pm on April 14, when two men called my husband. When he came out of the house, they left with him in a four-wheeler. When he did not return even late that night and his phone was switched off, I started searching for him in several places, but my search was in vain. The next day, we lodged a missing report with Dhanupali police,” says 30-year-old Binodini.

She says the Dhanupali police told her that the Bhubaneswar police had taken her husband to the capital in connection with a case. On April 17, Binodini came to Bhubaneswar to search for her husband.

“I met police officers, but no one helped me. They said that they did not know about my husband, even though I knew he had been in their custody for four days,” says Binodini. Her husband was working as a driver for an NGO in Sambalpur.

Two motorcycle-borne youths had fired at call centre employee Namita Padhi, 23, outside her Mancheswar office on April 13. The police had suspected the involvement of the driver of the Sambalpur-based NGO where Namita’s sister Kabita was working.

Sambalpur-based lawyer M.K. Bardhan, who has accompanied Binodini to the city, says she met deputy commissioner of police Nitinjeet Singh on Wednesday, but he did not reveal any information about Biswonath and told them to meet him in the evening. “When we called him in the evening he did not respond, so we approached the State Human Rights Commission,” says Bardhan.

The police denied having any knowledge about Biswonath’s whereabouts. “We will see when we get a letter from the human rights commission,” says a senior police officer. Police sources say that they had detained five persons in connection with the Mancheswar firing case and were searching for three others, including the two hired criminals, who had fired at Padhi.