Another ‘baby missing’ case hits a dead-end

CHENNAI: While there seems to be no breakthrough in the case of the missing three-year-old boy Sridhar, the Government Railway Police have hit a dead end in the investigation of another child, a five-month-old girl called Yazhini, who is suspected to have been kidnapped from Central railway station two months ago.
Police teams zeroed in on a 23-year-old pregnant woman from Mysore, who had eloped from home in her teenage, as a suspect through CCTV footage recorded at the station.But, police say, the woman was not cooperating with them during inquiry. Now investigators are left with no choice but to search for her partner, who lives in Andhra Pradesh and her relatives in Karnataka, to see if questioning them would yield any clue.
Yazhini of Kolathur went missing on March 9 when she was sleeping next to her mother at the Central railway station. Her parents Raja and Padma and her two siblings missed a train they were to board to Palani, and were to catch the next train.
During preliminary investigation, police found a camera footage that showed a woman dressed in salwar-kameez walking with a baby. Police identified and caught the woman 15 days later at the station when she arrived from Mysore, with the help of sweepers who noticed her sleeping on the platforms several times earlier. “She is now in a government home. We questioned her, but she is not cooperating. We can’t force her to give information,” a police officer said. Apparently, she was earlier detained by police in 2010 when she was found loitering on the platforms at Central.
A police team went to her native place in Mandya district to make inquiries with her parents. They found that the woman had eloped when she was 17, and had not been in touch with the family since then. “She had a son who she gave away to a couple. Her parents said they didn’t want their daughter back,” the officer said.
Police are now chasing her new partner who works in the railways in Andhra Pradesh. They are also looking for some of her relatives in Karnataka.