The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Slim chance for the `missing' lot

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Saturday, Jan 06, 2007
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Slim chance for the `missing' lot

Miscommunication between police stations hampers early tracing of the `missing', writes Marri Ramu

Nearly half of the 6,427 persons missing over past three years from the State capital remain untraced till date. Among those not found are 1,273 children!

These disturbing figures do raise questions about the methods being used to investigate the cases of missing persons.

Confusion all around

Sample this. A year ago, an infant was kidnapped from Koti and abandoned at Nayapul Maternity Hospital the same day.

Alerted by hospital authorities, the Charminar police began looking out for the parents.

The Sultan Bazar police, who registered a kidnap case, launched a hunt for kidnappers by sending radio messages and issuing look-out notices.

Finally, they learnt that the baby was in Nayapul hospital. With such a communication gap between two stations of the same city, one can as well imagine the fate of other missing cases.

The root cause

Why does this happen? All police stations receive messages and notices about missing persons and unidentified bodies from surrounding areas.

But there is no mechanism to compare and analyse features of missing persons with those of unidentified persons found dead in other localities.

City and District Crime Record Bureaux receive details of unidentified bodies from police stations and forward the data to the State Crime Records Bureau.

Software needed

Here too, no attempts are made to match details of missing persons with unidentified bodies. "Manually comparing each case is not possible. We need a specially designed software," a police officer said.

As a result, the police are not able to link up similar cases despite a clear pattern emerging.

Recently, two persons from Mirchowk and Nampally went missing and were found murdered in Nalgonda.

Though the same gang had kidnapped and killed them in a similar fashion, neither the city police nor their counterparts in Nalgonda could connect the cases.

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