Uttar Pradesh police on January 15 arrested a Muslim man from Karnataka for allegedly abducting a Hindu girl with the intention of forcefully converting her to Islam. The girl is from Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur, while the accused has been identified as 21-year old Mehboob, a resident of Vijayapura district in Karnataka.
Station House Officer (SHO), Chiluatal police station, Neeraj Kumar Rai said that the girl’s father, a retired Army man, had filed a missing report on January 5 after she did not return home from college. He said that on examining the call records the girl’s phone, it was revealed that she used to make frequent calls to a man mentioned as Mehboob on the Truecaller app. According to the app, Mehboob’s location was in Karnataka. A case was then lodged against the accused on January 11. The case was lodged under sections 366 (kidnapping, abduction or inducing woman to compel her into marriage ) and 363 (kidnapping) of the Indian Penal Code, besides the newly promulgated anti-conversion law of the Uttar Pradesh government. Subsequently, a three-member police team was sent to Karnataka to locate the accused and the girl.
According to the girl’s father, the accused had befriended befriended his daughter through social media last year and had lured her on the pretext of finding her a job. Indi Rural Police, Vijayapura, Karnataka and their counterparts at the Chiluatal police station, Uttar Pradesh arrested the accused near Indi Railway Station when he came to meet his father, who is a porter at the railway station. The accused’s father denied knowledge of his son’s doings.