Accused had contacted inter-State racketeers

Mysore/Mysuru: Vijayanagar Police have arrested five persons including a journalist on the charges of kidnapping a 40-day-old baby of a nomadic couple and have rescued the baby within a few hours.

Those arrested are journalist Manjunath, a resident of Hootagalli, his (Manjunath) relative Kumar of Pandavapura taluk, Indrakumar of Nagawala, his (Indrakumar) wife Supriya and his sister Vijayalakshmi. The Police have launched a search for co-accused Syed, his wife Sallu and Kiran, who are absconding.

The Police, who seized the mobile phones of the arrested, went through the contents of the devices only to unravel their links with a child trafficking racket, sources said.

Details: The nomadic couple, identified as Jeete Mandal and Ramadalli Devi of Gajaria district in Bihar, had come to Bengaluru and were staying at Thanisandra. They used to sell honey for a living.

As their relatives were in Mysuru, the couple, along with their baby, had come to Mysuru about 10 days ago and had put up a tent near Hinkal Outer-Ring Road and were staying there. They used to extract honey from beehives in rural areas and sell it.

Jeete Mandal said that a few days ago, journalist Manjunath and his relative Kumar had approached them and reportedly asked them to give their baby boy so that they could take care of it well, to which, they refused.

But in the wee hours of Apr. 17, when the couple were fast asleep, Manjunath and Kumar, who came to the tent along with Syed, Sallu and Kiran, allegedly kidnapped the baby.

Jeete Mandal said that when his wife Devi woke up at about 3 am, she did not find the baby and when she enquired with her relative who was in another tent next to theirs, he told Devi about  a woman carrying the baby from the tent and fleeing with a man, who was waiting at a distance                                          on a motorbike.

They didn’t care even when he (the relative) yelled at them, said Mandal.

The couple then lodged a complaint at Vijayanagar Police Station at about 8 am.

Vijayanagar Police Inspector Pradeep, Sub-Inspectors Vishwanath, Narayana and Vanajakshi and staff Shivakumar, Likith, Muraligowda, Sanjay, Annappa Devadiga, Nandeesh, Srinivasa Murthy, Prabhakar and Kumar of CDR Wing, who swung into action, conducted an operation and arrested the five accused at Modur village in Hunsur in the evening and rescued the baby.

The accused were produced before a Court which has remanded them to judicial custody.

It is learnt that, the accused had kidnapped the baby with an ulterior motive to sell the infant and had even established a contact with inter-State racketeers and struck a deal with them.

Police sources said, had they not acted in time, the accused would have shifted their hideout  to another place to elude the law.