meerut: Uttarakhand: 15-yr-old gang-raped, cops find accused using Facebook | Dehradun News – Times of India

HARIDWAR: A 15-year-old girl from Jwalapur, Haridwar, who had left home in late January in a huff after her mother scolded her and then remained missing for the next three weeks, was allegedly gang-raped by four men in Meerut over 18 days.
The girl made it back home but did not have much information on her rapists, except the first names of two of them. Based on that, for nearly a month, police scanned Facebook profiles of “Israr and Kadir from Meerut” and finally tracked them down first. All four were arrested on Wednesday.
Jwalapur police said the girl’s family had filed a missing report on January 30. For the next two weeks, police went through nearly 2,000 clips of CCTV footage, trying to trace the girl. They found that she had taken a Saharanpur Roadways bus from Jawalapur.
Police tracked the driver and found the girl had indeed reached Saharanpur. A woman who had taken the girl to her house in Saharanpur was also tracked and she revealed that the girl had gone to Meerut on another bus to “meet an aunt”. After this, police started going through CCTV footage of routes leading from Saharanpur to Delhi and Meerut.
Meanwhile, on February 18, the girl came back home, in a state of shock, and did not speak for two days. Senior sub-inspector Nitesh Sharma told TOI, “The girl slowly opened up. On the bus to Meerut, she had met three daily wagers who worked in a sugarcane field. They then locked her in a house in a cane field in Meerut and gang-raped her for the next 18 days.
Their contractor got to know and joined them in brutalizing her. Finally, they let her go and put her on a bus to Haridwar.” Sharma said that when the girl got back, she had no information to give the cops, except that two of the rapists were named “Israr” and “Kadir”. They took her to Meerut, tried to find the cane field where she was held captive, but the girl couldn’t recognize the place.
“We then turned to Facebook and searched for profiles of ‘Kadir’ on Facebook. Finally, one of them was recognised by the girl. Kadir’s profile led us to Israr’s. We made a Facebook profile for the girl and sent a friend request to Kadir. When he accepted after a few days, we sent him a message to meet up and took his contact number. He asked the girl to come to Meerut. We reached the location he gave, arrested him and then tracked down the three other accused,” Sharma said.
The accused have been identified as Abdul Kadir, Israr, Naeem and their contractor Ahsan. They are residents of Chilkana, Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. A case has been registered under section 376 (rape) and 365 (kidnapping) of the IPC relevant sections of the POCSO Act.

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