Mumbai, Jul 22 (Mid-day) : For the last three months, police in three states have been searching for a teenager from Mohali, Punjab, who had fled her home to make it big in Mumbai. Her mother, who has been looking for her in the two cities as well as Surat fears that her daughter may have been lured by the promise of a film role and may be in danger.
Gunreet Kaur went missing from her home in May earlier this year. Investigations revealed that she had stayed in a neighborhood guesthouse for a few days. This was determined through CCTV footage, retrieved by the cops after they found out she had logged into her email account at a local cyber cafe.
However, in spite of the best efforts of Mohali Crime Branch, Gunreet remained untraceable. Almost 20 days after she went missing, she called up her mother, Sukhdeep Kaur, on June 9. But her mother missed the call, and when she called back on the number, she came to know it was a PCO in Surat.
She explained the situation to the operator, who gave her a description of the caller, which matched Gunreet’s. Sukhdeep rushed to the Surat police, and the Crime Branch there traced the phone booth to one near the city’s railway station.
They also managed to collect CCTV footage from the station, and it showed Gunreet with a mobile phone that she did not possess in Mohali. On June 22, her mother saw that she had activated her iPad, and the Surat police was alerted again. But this time, her location was traced to Oshiwara in Mumbai.
The Mohali Crime Branch alerted their Mumbai counterparts, who zeroed in on Sunshine Building in Lokhandwala. The Mohali and Mumbai police teams reached the building but drew a blank: the girl had left. The police forces in three states have still been unable to trace the 18 year-old, and her mother, a divorced schoolteacher, is heartbroken.
She has been living in Mumbai for the past two months in the hope that the police would finally manage to find her only daughter. She suspects that someone is leading her daughter to these cities to take advantage of her. “I suspect my daughter is in deep trouble. Someone is behind her movements, and they are constantly taking her from place to place.
Despite searching for her from Mohali to Mumbai, cops have failed to trace her exact location,” said a stressed Sukhdeep. “She was last located in Mumbai, so it cannot be ruled out that someone misguided her in the name of a role in films. I will wait here in this city till I get more information about my daughter,” she added.