Family of 23-year-old murdered girl allege inaction by Mumbai cops

“What have you come here for?” That might be the last question you expect when you approach a police station, but that was what the anguished family members of the 23-year-old software engineer, whose half-burnt body was found in a highly decomposed state in suburban Mumbai on Thursday, encountered when they approached a local police station for help in locating her. Eventually on Thursday morning, eleven days after she went missing and 10 days after the Mumbai Police were given complete information about the girl’s last known location based on her cellphone signals, her relatives began to comb the dense thicket just off the Eastern Express Highway themselves. [caption id=“attachment_1345895” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. PTI[/caption] It took all of 12 hours for three search teams of three each, including helpful taxi-drivers and at least two members of a non-governmental organisation, to find the body. The body was identified by a gold ring on her finger. For the family of the victim, an employee with Tata Consultancy Services, the brush with the Mumbai Police couldn’t have been worse. The lethargy and inaction of the police for 12 days was criminal, the family says, and possibly cost the girl her life. Suzeeth (last name withheld to protect the family’s identity), a relative of the victim, was among those who eventually found the body. “Nothing was moving so we decided on doing a combing operation ourselves,” he said. Having landed in Mumbai from Vijayawada on the morning of 12 January, almost a week after the girl went missing, Suzeeth and other family members fanned out in the slums of Bhandup, armed with photographs. “We went to the slums, up the hillock, asked locals if they had seen her, if they had seen anything suspicious,” he said. They approached the police, the railway police (where the FIR was registered before the case was moved to the Mumbai Police Crime Branch), a senior IPS officer and others. They knew her cellphone had been active last in Bhandup, a fact gleaned by tapping sources in BSNL to track her cellphones. The family had done the bulk of legwork usually undertaken by the police – tracking the cellphone location, obtaining call records and search parties walking around the last active location of her phone. A missing person’s complaint was lodged first at the Vijayawada railway police station. The victim should have reached Mumbai at 5.10 am on board the Vijayawada-LTT Express, on 5 January. The train had reached Secunderabad on schedule, where a friend gave her a packed lunch. She had also called around midnight, from Solapur, promising to call the following morning upon reaching Mumbai. When she did not call by 6 am, her worried father began to call both her cellphones. They kept ringing unanswered. Her grandfather’s brother, a retired commandant of the special police batallion in Andhra Pradesh, was approached for advice. Since the girl had made two trips to Mumbai earlier without incident, he advised the family to be patient. Her father also received a call from the hostel in Mumbai where she was to have checked in that the girl hadn’t arrived. Then, around 3.30 pm on 5 January, both her phones were switched off. Family members pitched in, made calls to people they knew in Mumbai and in the offices of the telephone service providers and got to work immediately. The retired police commandant requested a Mumbai relative to register a complaint at Andheri, where her hostel is located. The police refused – there was no evidence of a crime in their jurisdiction. The telephone companies also provided the crucial bit of information that the numbers were switched off at the same time and that the last signal was tracked to Bhandup in Mumbai, with a specific cellphone tower location too. The Mumbai Police, say family members, began to act only on 7 January, after a fax was sent to the Commissioner of Police in Mumbai from Hyderabad, from the office of the Director General of Police in Andhra Pradesh. The family meanwhile sent out emails to friends in Mumbai, with all details of the girl’s cellphone’s last known location. Over the next few days, senior police officers from Andhra Pradesh called the Mumbai Police and every time family members approached police officers, they say they sensed hostility. They say the pressure from family members and others on investigators was simply unwelcome. Finally, as the Mumbai police seemed to have no leads, an increasingly desperate family decided to travel to Mumbai. Suzeeth and a few others arrived on 12 January. When Suzeeth met a senior IPS officer, for the first 15 minutes, there was no eye contact, he recollected. “It seemed he didn’t want to meet us.. he was certain it was a case of elopement and that the girl would come back in 10 days,” he said. This was despite the fact that the call records bore no indication of a possible elopement, Suzeeth says. I don’t have anything against the police, says Suzeeth, but he described the treatment they encountered: Senior officers seemed certain the girl would just come back, married; nobody is certain if the police in fact searched the Bhandup talao area (where a cellphone tower last picked up a signal from the phone); and when they decided to search the area themselves, local policemen simply refused to help – it was just not their job, the police complaint was not registered with them. On Thursday, when they decided to search the area themselves, they approached the Kanjurmarg police station but were rebuffed immediately. Not long after the family split into three search teams along with friends and local residents, Suzeeth found a foul smell emanating from near the highway-side drains. Not far from the service road of Eastern Express Highway, Suzeeth found a dead body, burnt, recognisable as a female’s only from the length of the hair. Eventually, the body would be identified as the victim’s from a gold ring on the finger. Pieces of clothing were found nearby, preliminary post-mortem reports said there were blunt injuries to the body. “I don’t have anything against the cops,” Suzeeth reiterated, speaking to Firstpost on the phone. “But it was pathetic how policemen are not trained to ask how they can help us, and instead they ask us why we have approached them.” The Lokmanya Tilak Terminus station platform the girl alighted at had no CCTV footage – in a city that has spent a few hundred crores on CCTV coverage for its railway stations that have been the target of terror attack and all manner of crimes in the past few years. “There should at least be some preventive measures in place. A senior IPS officer says it’s not the police’s job to check if the CCTVs are working. WHose job is it then? Ours?” Suzeeth said. The girl’s grandfather’s brother, the retired police commandant, says it’s inexplicable that the police moved so slowly. “For ten days they had no clue?” he asked. He said the case was “worse than Nirbhaya’s.” Suzeeth and other family members will take the body back to Vijayawada later on Friday night. Suzeeth says he wants the police to give them some kind of assurance that they will locate the culprits. “That is the least we should expect, so that there are no cases like this in future,” he said.