3 minutes of readingBombayJanuary 30, 2026 21:31 IST
In an investigation where leads kept failing, it was finally a little boy’s socks and a network of nearly 1,600 CCTV cameras that helped the Thane police. solve the kidnapping case in which three people were arrested on Thursday.
The kidnapping took place on January 22, when Mumbra resident Farzana Mansoori (23) was crossing the road with her two daughters Anbiya (3) and Afiya (3 months). When her daughter began to cry, a woman dressed in a burqa approached her and told her that she was also crossing the street and could she hold her youngest daughter.
Farzana handed her daughter over to the woman. However, when he reached the other side of the road, the woman was nowhere to be seen. When the woman could not be located even after searching for her for some time, Farzana suspected her to be a kidnapper and approached the local Mumbra police station where a case of kidnapping was registered.
The police began the investigation and found security cameras in which the woman is seen getting into a car shortly after crossing the street. Thane Police Commissioner Ashutosh Dumbare said that while the car’s registration number could not be seen on CCTV, the team could see ‘aai’ (mother) written on the back of the car and was able to identify it. The driver told police that he dropped the woman at Mumbra railway station.
Six teams saw a woman boarding a train from Badlapur and CCTV image tracking and location Here to Badlapur. However, she turned out to be the wrong woman.
“Our teams started scanning the images again and found another woman dressed in a burqa. This time, while the girl was covered under her burqa, a few centimeters of the girl’s socks were visible, allowing her mother to identify the daughter,” Dumbare said. The police team saw that he was talking to another couple at the Mumbra railway station, to whom he handed over the child and left the station.
The couple was seen leaving the platform on a CSMT-bound train. While the police team tracked them to the Thane railway station, where they had changed their appearance, they were not seen in further footage. The police team then zeroed in on the woman who had handed over the child to the couple.
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They scanned the CCTV cameras and found that the car driver had dropped her on Shadi Mahal Road in Insha Nagar area in Mumbra. “Since there were many buildings there, the police used their local informants and finally identified the woman as Nasreena Shaikh,” Dumbare said.
When the police questioned Shaikh, she broke down and said that she had kidnapped the girl and handed her over to her sister Khairunnisa Gulab and brother-in-law Mohd Gulab, who had taken her to Khetri village in Akola district. “We immediately sent a police team to Akola, took safe custody of the child and arrested the couple,” Dumbare said.
He added: “The couple from Akola had no children for the last eight or nine years. Khairunnisa told us that she had seen some videos on YouTube about abandoned minors in Mumbra and had told her sister about it. In the past they had also tried to abduct a minor but were unsuccessful.”
