Delhi, Jan, 26: It was a chance meeting on a business trip, but there was a spark. At least that is how the resident of Jammu and Kashmir describes her meeting with the tall, well-built 31-year-old man sporting a thick beard at New Delhi’s posh Defence Colony on a foggy December day in 2019.
A volley of phone calls and meetings later, the 40-year-old woman took a second leap of faith. On January 20, 2020, she tied the knot with the 31-year-old man in a low-key wedding at an Arya Samaj temple in New Delhi. The ceremony was followed by the woman and her two daughters from her first marriage, then aged 17 and 15 years, moving into a flat in Delhi.
A short business trip to Srinagar, her hometown, in June 2021, would turn into a nearly four-year nightmare for the woman. In November 2024, the Delhi Police arrested her husband from his hideout in Dehradun for allegedly kidnapping her elder daughter and sexually assaulting her. A month after his arrest, the elder daughter, now 20, gave birth to a boy.
“It is a shocking case,” says a police officer privy to the investigation. “This man married a divorced woman (in 2020). Then (in 2021), he kidnapped his newly wedded wife’s 17-year-old daughter from her earlier marriage, claiming that he had married her. He now has a child with her”.
How did this man pursue the 40-year-old woman? The Delhi Police officers told The Indian Express that “both of them work in the event management industry”.
“She said they fell for each other when they first met in Delhi in December 2019. They exchanged numbers, which led to phone calls. The calls then led to meetings each time she was in Delhi for work. Seemingly determined to take their relationship to the next level, he travelled to Srinagar to meet her elderly parents and declared that he was in love with her,” a police officer says.
In the second week of June 2021, the woman had to go to Srinagar for a day. “She says she asked him to accompany her, but he insisted on staying back to take care of the children. When the woman returned to Delhi the next day, she felt her elder daughter looked extremely troubled. Despite her concern, the daughter didn’t utter a word,” the police officer says.
It didn’t take long for the woman to discover why her elder daughter looked troubled. She told the police that the accused had made sexual advances towards the girl while she was in Srinagar. “She managed to escape his advances and locked herself in a room. Extremely distressed, she called her father (the first husband) from the room. I learnt about the incident from my first husband,” the woman told the police.
As soon as she learnt about the incident, the woman told the police that she decided to sever all ties with the accused. “His family begged me to not leave him. He called up my ex-husband and apologised to him as well,” the woman told the police.
While she was working out the modalities of her separation with the accused, the woman sent her daughters to stay at a relative’s house in Bawana. The woman did not know then, but “something much worse” was in store for her small family — her elder daughter went “missing” from the relative’s Bawana house a few days later.
The Delhi Police say the woman lodged a case of kidnapping on June 26, 2021. “She did not know what had happened to her daughter. We suspected that the accused had somehow lured her daughter, but the woman refused to believe us at first. She could not imagine that the man she had fallen in love with and married had kidnapped her elder daughter. Besides, she had already separated from him because he had molested her daughter in her absence,” the police officer says.
So the Delhi Police started searching for the man, who was missing from his house in the national capital too. “We checked his call data records, and scanned CCTV cameras at bus stands, railway stations and several other places, but there was no trace of the accused or the woman’s daughter. On October 28, 2022, over a year after the girl went missing, the accused was declared a proclaimed offender,” the police officer says.
Despite several raids and other efforts, the accused and the woman’s daughter seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth, says a police officer. Two years later, in November 2024, someone tipped off the Delhi Police saying they saw the accused in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, with the woman’s daughter.
Though a Delhi Police team, led by Assistant Commissioner Pawan Kumar and comprising inspector Vivekanand and SI Saifi, was rushed to Dehradun, they failed to locate the accused in the Uttarakhand capital. “There was no record of anyone by that name (the accused’s name) living in Dehradun,” the police officer recalls, adding that they realised the accused was probably living in the hill town under a new identity.
The theory would prove to be true later, the police discovered. “We found out later that the accused had stolen someone’s identity and had used that ID to rent a flat in Dehradun,” the police officer says.
“He was extremely confident that he had covered his tracks well. So much so that he was even planning to get his tenant verification done from the local police station. However, he made one, tiny mistake,” the police officer says.
While scanning the bank records of the mother of the accused, the police zeroed in on a money transfer made by someone unknown via a UPI app. It was the break the police had been waiting for.
“We traced the details of the person who had made that transfer and a police team visited his house. We would learn later that the accused had a stolen identity. Since the unknown man looked nothing like the accused, he was questioned by the team. He told them that he had never seen the accused. However, he is still not in the clear since the mobile SIM card used by the accused and his Dehradun rental agreement are all in the name of the alleged victim of identity theft,” the police officer says.
To confirm their suspicion, the police went back to the day the woman’s elder daughter went missing from Bawana. “We suspected the accused had been using his fake identity right from the start. So we scanned the ticket records of buses that left Bawana the day the woman’s daughter had gone missing. That’s how we found a bus ticket under the man’s assumed name,” the police officer says.
Nearly four years after the Delhi Police started searching for the missing daughter, their search led them to a rented flat in Dehradun. “The woman’s daughter, now over 20 years old, was eight months pregnant with the man’s baby,” the police officer says.
Since the woman’s daughter was a minor at the time of her alleged kidnapping, the police added relevant sections to the kidnapping complaint. A month after the man’s arrest, she gave birth to their son.
“Though she is aware that the accused is still married to her mother, she insists he is her husband and that she wants to live with him. She refuses to undergo counselling. In fact, she is staying with his family in a village in south Delhi and not with her mother,” the police officer says.
In a fresh blow to the mother, she has discovered that the accused never dissolved his first marriage when he married her. On December 6, 2024, the woman lodged a case of rape and cheating with police in Srinagar. The accused was subsequently taken into custody by the Jammu and Kashmir Police and is now lodged in a jail in Kashmir.
“We are scrutinising all the documents the accused had used to conceal his identity while on the run. The role of his parents is also under scanner. Our team is currently in Kashmir to investigate the matter,” says Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime) Sanjay Sain.
As for the woman, she is devastated. A police officer says, “She feels completely duped and helpless.”
