A three-year old girl abducted from Howrah station on March 5 was rescued by the Howrah Government Railway Police (GRP) from Rajasthan’s Sawai Madhopur. The three kidnappers were also arrested.

Early in the morning of March 5, the child along with her mother was waiting at the Howrah station to board a local train for Dhaniakhali in Hooghly district, when a middle-aged woman approached the mother and started a conversation with her.

As the conversation continued, the stranger offered to buy some food for the child and convinced the mother to let the child accompany her to the food stall.

The mother did not get to see the child for almost a week before a seven-member team from the Howrah GRP rescued the child and handed over to the mother, who had travelled along with the cops.

“The mother waited for a long time and then realised the stranger was not going to come back. When she reported the incident about two hours had already been lost,” said a senior officer in the Howrah GRP. “Her description of the woman’s looks, attire and even age were vague.”

The cops started sifting through the closed circuit television camera footage from all the cameras installed inside the station as well as in the adjacent areas. Acting on the wee bit of information provided by the distraught mother, it took the GRP two days to locate a woman and a child matching the description given by the complainant.

The woman identified as Shahanara Begum was caught on camera boarding a bus on the Howrah-Metiabruz route. She was next spotted at Bichali Ghat under the Matiabruz police station, Kolkata Police from where she took a ferry to cross the river Hooghly for Nazirgunj in Howrahs Sankrail.

From Nazirgunj, Sahanara Begum boarded an auto-rickshaw which dropped her at the Sankrail station. Around 11am, she boarded a Howrah-Panskura local and alighted at Phooleswar station. She was traced to Uluberia’s Birshibpur.

“During her interrogation she confessed that she had handed over the kid to another woman Mafuza Bibi,” said the officer.

Mafuza was arrested from Bauria on March 12, but the child could not be recovered.

The kidnappers told the railway cops that the child had already been moved to Jaipur from where one Soraj Kanjar would take her to Sawai Madhopur. “Going through the call records, we suspect the child had been moved out of Bengal by March 9 or 10. Kanjar is being brought to Howrah on transit remand,” an officer said.

The seven-member team and the kidnapped child’s mother left for Jaipur on the evening of March 11 and with the help of Rajasthan police the child was rescued two days later.