'Tarun did not get off the train at Dadar,' says father

Screenshot of Tarun at Sawantwadi station on October 3 (right) a file picture of Tarun Gupta

The search for 16-year-old autistic teenager Tarun Gupta, who went missing from his home near Colaba on October 1, 2019, after getting mixed up with an election rally that was passing by, seems to have taken a new turn.

His father Vinod Kumar Gupta, who, along with a few of his friends and family members, have been searching for Tarun across multiple states for the past 10 months, says that they might have been conducting the search all wrong up until.

"We assumed that he alighted from the Madgaon-Dadar 12052 at Dadar station on October 3 around 11.40 pm," Vinod told mid-day. "Multiple passengers saw him aboard the train while they were getting down. Even though we [search team and police authorities] couldn't spot him in any of the CCTV cameras at the platform, we thought he must have got off someplace where the cameras aren't there, and then boarded another train. But maybe we have been doing it wrong all this while and hadn't realised this before that Tarun did not get off the train at all."

Vinod said the passengers he spoke with who were aboard that train confirmed that Tarun too was aboard it till it came to its final destination - Dadar. He was last spotted walking to the back of the train.

"In all probability, Tarun went to use the washroom at the back of the train. He takes at least 45 minutes whenever he visits the washroom, by which time the train doors must have shut leaving him inside. The train leaves again in a couple of hours at 5.25 am from Dadar for Madgaon. The main problem is that we have only been searching till Sawantwadi up until now since that is the place from where Tarun boarded the Madgaon-Dadar train. Instead, we should have been searching up till Madgaon."

Vinod said he and his family and friends are currently chalking out a road map to search every village and station between Panvel and Madgaon, and will depart on the search next week.

01 Oct
Day Tarun went missing last year

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