Mumbai: Delhi beggar held for stealing 3-year-old child from footpath dwellers in Borivli

The three-year-old boy with his mother at Borvli GRP police station

A 35-year-old woman from Delhi has been arrested for stealing the three-year-old child of a Borivli-based footpath dweller couple who had taken her in and let her live with them for three days. Cops said the accused, a beggar, committed the crime as she was in need of a child to increase her source of income.

According to Borivli GRP officers, the accused woman and her daughters, aged 10 and 17, had arrived in Mumbai three days ago and befriended the couple who live outside Borivli station and lived with them before taking off with their kid on Friday night. After the toddler's parents approached the police, cops started a search operation.

The accused Anju Kisan Valmiki with Borivli GRP officers

"We received the complaint around 8 pm and pressed all our teams into action to carry out a massive search across all the platforms at Borivli station and the surrounding locality. We also scanned CCTV footage from nearby localities," said senior inspector Anil Kadam.

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As the search at Borivli did not yield result, officers scanned CCTV footage from all railway stations in the city. "We found a footage from Dadar station where the kid was seen with a young girl. The parents of the child recognised the girl as the daughter of the woman who had stayed with them for three days," said Kadam.

"We had learnt the name of the train the three were going to board with the kid and arrested the accused, Anju Kisan Valmiki, and detained her daughters on Saturday," said Kadam. The three confessed to the crime and told the police that they had come to Mumbai for the first time and that they befriended the child's parents with the plan to steal their three-year-old boy.

On Friday when the kid was playing with her daughters, Valmiki lured the boy to the platform by offering to buy him a lollipop. The trio then boarded a Churchgate-bound slow local train and got off at Dadar station. "We assume that the trio have been to Mumbai earlier too and kidnapped other kids using the same modus operandi. We are questioning Valmiki to find out more," Kadam added further.