It was early morning on January 21. The flurry of activity at New Delhi Railway Station was yet to begin. The calm was punctuated by a 30-year-old woman, in dishevelled clothing, sobbing as she ran in circles on Platform 1. “Someone stole my child… someone stole my child,” she cried, pleading for help. Her four-month-old baby girl was missing.She knew the entire premises of the railway station very well. She worked here, selling pens, every day. She also lived inside the station. She kept searching till noon. She was exhausted. Her older daughter, aged seven, held her hand as she sat in a corner.She finally decided to go to the police. She knew there was a police station on the premises.This woman had come to the Capital from a village in Bihar. She didn’t have a place to stay and lived inside the railway station, sleeping in the waiting hall or any other corner. She was married and had two children – a boy and a girl — when she arrived in Delhi. Her son, now a 14-year-old, is in a de-addiction centre while her daughter accompanies her.Four months ago, she told police, she gave birth to a baby girl, days after her husband had died. Subsequently, she said, she married a man who works in a tea stall at Old Delhi Railway Station.“At 7 pm (on January 20), I went to the waiting hall on Platform 1 along with my two daughters. We ate there, and around 1 am, I slept. My daughters were already asleep. Around 5 am, I woke up and saw that my four-month-old daughter wasn’t there. I looked around for her but couldn’t find her,” the woman told police. In January and October 2024, two children were kidnapped from the premises of New Delhi Railway station. (Express Archive)The case was taken up by Inspector Vijay Samaria. The first step was to scan footage from CCTV cameras around the waiting hall.Story continues below this ad“We saw a woman holding a baby in the footage,” Inspector Samaria said. “When we looked at the footage again, we were startled. The woman’s gait matched the kidnapper in another case where a two-and-a-half-year-old boy was taken from the railway station. There was another striking similarity. In both cases, the woman kidnapper had gone to Badarpur (bordering Haryana) in an auto-rickshaw.”Inspector Samaria was talking about a case that his police station had registered last October and was yet to be solved. A 24-year-old woman from Prayagraj (UP) was on her way to Punjab in search of work. Her husband, she told police, had abandoned her and her child a year ago. Her two-and-a-half-year-old son was accompanying her. She laid a blanket on the floor near the reservation counter and slept, her son lying next to her. “When I woke up, my son was not there,” she told police.At that time, CCTV footage had shown a woman kidnapping the child and getting into an auto rickshaw. Police traced the vehicle to its final destination — Badarpur. Once the woman got out, she vanished. Police had picked up the auto-rickshaw driver but he didn’t know anything.This time around, when police found that the same woman was involved in another kidnapping case, senior officers got involved. “We suspected that these two kidnappings are linked and are part of a larger racket,” Inspector Samaria said.“And it was indeed a larger child trafficking racket”.Story continues below this adAccording to the police records, there have been 11,869 kidnapping/abduction cases of children in Delhi in the last three years: 3,948 cases in 2024, 3,974 cases in 2023 and 3,947 cases in 2022. Data shows that 18,246 children were reported missing in the last three years. In 80% of the cases, police said, these children were traced and reunited with their families.How the case was crackedDeputy Commissioner of Police, Railways, KPS Malhotra, formed a team comprising ACP Sanjeev Chahar and Inspectors Samaria and Vishwanath Paswan to tackle the case. He asked the team to rope in the policemen involved in probing the earlier case (of October 17, 2024) where the trail had gone cold.“The auto-rickshaw that had taken the woman to Badarpur was identified. This time, too, the driver didn’t know a thing. But he gave us a piece of information that proved significant,” Inspector Paswan said. “He told us that as they got close to Badarpur, the woman called someone on the phone and asked the person on the other end to come and pick them up.” Like several hawkers, a 30-year-old woman took to living and sleeping inside the railway station premises. It was while she was sleeping one night that her four-month-old baby girl went missing. (Express Archive)Police asked the auto-rickshaw driver to show them the exact spot where he had dropped the kidnapper. “In earlier cases, too, we had identified the place where the autorickshaw had dropped her off. Then we matched data dump from the two spots and scanned every number that was active at that particular time,” Inspector Paswan said.Story continues below this ad“One IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number popped up twice but with two different phone numbers. This means the handset used was the same even as the user changed the number.”Police then scanned call detail records of both numbers. “Both were found active at the crime scene… inside New Delhi Railway Station,” Inspector Paswan said.Finally, the kidnapper’s identity was established: 35-year-old Aarti. Police traced her to a house in Faridabad, where she lived with her husband Suraj. She wasn’t home. Police started tracking Aarti’s phone.“It was traced to the Maha Kumbh mela, and as luck would have it, her phone was suddenly switched off,” Inspector Samaria said. “This was exactly the time when there was a stampede there… when we couldn’t trace her phone, we thought she may have been a victim (of the stampede).”Story continues below this adPolice, however, scanned through her call details records and zeroed in on a couple of numbers she was constantly in touch with before her phone was switched off. These numbers were active in Faridabad. “We called one of the numbers and took the person into confidence… he told us Aarti was alive and her phone was stolen in Kumbh,” Inspector Samaria said.Soon, the police picked up Aarti and Suraj.Aarti, who is from Bardhhaman district in West Bengal, told police she had married a man named Shakoor 17 years ago and they had two sons. They were together for seven years before they separated. She left her children with her first husband after the divorce and moved to Faridabad with an “acquaintance”.In 2017, she married Suraj, a resident of UP’s Badaun district, who is a daily wage labourer. They have two children — a six-year-old son and a 15-month-old boy — she told police. Before she married Suraj, she told police, she went by the name Rajina. “My name was changed by the priest during our wedding ceremony,” she told police.According to police, Aarti told them that two years ago, she met a woman named Priya in Faridabad. “She said she was a doctor and ran her own clinic… and knew several childless couples who are ready to pay a handsome amount to adopt a child… she also told me she knows several gangs who steal children and deliberately break their limbs and make them beg,” Aarti told the police.Story continues below this ad Police scanned CCTV footage at the railway station and found that the same woman was behind both kidnappings. (Express Archive)“Priya told me that if I could arrange for a child, I would be paid a good amount. She told me if I wished to sell my own child too, she could arrange a buyer,” Aarti claimed.Aarti decided to join hands with Priya. “My husband couldn’t manage household expenses… we have been facing a severe financial crisis… I desperately needed money,” she told police.The next character in this racket was Nirmala alias Nimmi who worked at a lawyer’s office in Delhi. Her job, police said, was to arrange for legal documents of adoption so the entire process looks legitimate.Police made Aarti call Nimmi and tell her she had arranged yet another child. Nimmi fell for the bait and was arrested.Story continues below this adPolice, meanwhile, found out that Priya’s real name was Kanta Bujhel and she was a nurse at a private hospital in Faridabad. A police team reached the hospital. They were aware that she rode a scooter. “Her scooter was in the parking lot. We came to know she was assisting in a childbirth and was in the operation theatre. So our team, who were in civil clothes, waited outside,” Inspector Samaria said.“Some people there mistook them as officials who had come for road construction-related work. The team waited for around three hours. Finally, she came out and was arrested.”Once Kanta was picked up, the entire racket unravelled.“We found photos of at least 18 children on the phones of Nimmi and Kanta… we know there are more suppliers in this ring; they are being identified,” Inspector Samaria said.“So far, we have identified two more suppliers and three-four buyers in Delhi as well as other parts of the country. There are also two other middlemen who would fix the deals.”Story continues below this adPolice said Nimmi and Aarti, both five months pregnant, were produced before a court and sent to judicial custody.The MOMultiple layers of this child kidnapping and trafficking racket have been exposed during the police probe. “This racket is like a web… each time we make an arrest, we find the involvement of more people… it keeps branching out. We have already arrested four and a dozen more are under our surveillance,” said Samaria.Police found that Aarti’s role was to arrange the children. She would mostly kidnap toddlers from poor, downtrodden and homeless people because “nobody will search for their children after a while”.Once she kidnapped a child, she would send pictures to both Kanta and Nimmi. After a deal was struck, Aarti and Suraj would pretend to be the biological parents of the child and sign the adoption papers when the child was handed over to the foster parents to make it look legitimate.Kanta, police said, was in touch with a few doctors and several childless couples. She has also been buying newborn babies from women in desperate need of money. “Kanta would use codes while communicating with Aarti and other suppliers. ‘Chota file’ was used to refer to a baby girl. A baby boy was called ‘bhadi file’. While a girl child was sold for Rs 50,000 to a lakh, the price for a baby boy was fixed between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 4 lakh,” Inspector Samaria said.Kanta had even told Aarti that she would compensate her with a piece of land worth Rs 2.5 lakh, if she gave her newborn child after delivery, police said.Police said they have identified another chain linked to Nimmi and suspect she was involved in supplying kidnapped children to begging gangs in Delhi.This chain, police said, was unearthed after scanning Nimmi’s mobile phone. “Apart from Aarti, she was in touch with another supplier in Malka Ganj, Old Delhi, who has been identified only as PB. Nimmi was also in touch with a woman who arranged her buyers,” Inspector Samaria said.Police, meanwhile, have recovered the two children kidnapped by Aarti from New Delhi Railway station.Aarti had sold the two-and-a-half-year-old boy, kidnapped last year, to Nimmi, who asked a contact to find a buyer. The deal, police said, was struck with a man in Loni for Rs 3 lakh. This man, police said, further sold the boy to a couple in Loni. The couple had two daughters and were desperate to have a son, police found.“We recovered the boy from Loni and seized the fake adoption documents,” Inspector Samaria said. “The child is at a shelter home and we have already informed his mother who will soon arrive from Prayagraj.”The four-month-old girl was recovered from a woman in Paharganj. “Aarti had handed over the child to Kanta, who subsequently sold her,” Inspector Samaria said.Police have found pictures and documents of four other children sold to a couple based in Pathankot, two doctors and a childless woman respectively. “We are still verifying the identity of the children,” Inspector Samaria said.