Missing Mumbai's boy’s family turns to Facebook for support

It was after the hearing of his petition that the state government set up special cells at police stations to trace missing persons.

However, with the police making no headway in tracing his brother, a software professional, missing since 2008, Shyam Patelia, has formed a group on the social networking website Facebook. Called ‘Justice for Brijesh Patelia’, the group already has 200 members who plan to visit the Bombay high court whenever the case is heard in order to highlight the high number of missing persons in the state.

Shyam, who regularly attends the court, said, “I want the state government to know that when a person goes missing, the entire family is disturbed and the police’s archaic ways of investigations offer no relief.”

Chandrakant Patelia, father of Brijesh, has moved a habeas corpus petition in the high court. During the hearing, the state government informed the court that as per data collated across Mumbai, Thane and Raigad districts in 2005, of the 98,151 missing persons, police were able to trace only 80,133.
Mira Road resident Brijesh  was kidnapped on August 27, 2008.

As per the petition in court, Brijesh’s Gmail account was accessed after the incident. But the police took four months to confirm details about the access, by which time the information was removed from Google’s servers.

The state has now been given the go-ahead to move appropriate authorities in the US to get information from Brijesh’s Yahoo account.