Two girls and a woman from Bengal were rescued from a home of two alleged human traffickers in Delhi on Saturday, police said.
The raid on the home in Seelampur, in northeast Delhi, followed the arrest of the alleged traffickers, identified as Manjila Bibi and her husband Hasan.
A complaint filed by relatives of a girl in South 24-Parganas, who had been missing since March last year, triggered a chain of events that culminated in the arrest and the rescue.
The breakthrough came after a concerted effort involving the Bengal and Delhi police, Child Welfare Committee in Delhi and a group of NGOs.
“We arrested Manjila and Hasan and they led us to the house. We found a woman and two girls in their house. One of the minors was the girl from South 24-Parganas,” said an officer in the Bengal police team that was in Delhi.
Of the other two, the minor is from Malda and the woman is from North 24-Parganas. The Malda girl is said to have told the cops that she was 19 and also showed an Aadhaar card.
“We called up the police station in her locality (Malda). The local police obtained her school certificate that had her date of birth. According to that, she is 14,” said Virender Singh of Mission Mukti Foundation, an NGO that helped the police in the rescue.
The girl later said Manjila got her the Aadhaar card with the wrong age, Singh said.
“Manjila is a pimp and a notorious trafficker. She intended to use both the minor girls for commercial sexual exploitation. The woman
from North 24-Parganas is already into prostitution at a brothel on GB Road (in Delhi),” said Sidhant Ghosh of the Rescue and Relief Foundation, the other NGO involved in the rescue.
All three women were taken to a shelter home. The two accused were produced in a Delhi court on Sunday. They are being brought to Bengal on transit remand.
Manjila, who is from South 24-Parganas, allegedly trafficked the girl from the same district by tempting her with the promise of a “trip to a new place”.
“The Malda girl was trafficked by Hasan, along with her mother in 2021. Her
mother is a sex worker,” said Ghosh.
“Hasan and Manjila would traffic minor girls from Bengal and Assam and force them into prostitution in the GB Road red-light area,” said Roop Sudesh Vimal, former member of the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights, who was part of the rescue team.