Thane cops nab husband, wife for stealing newborn from hospital

It was lock-up time for Sonu and Gudiya Rajbhar, a husband-wife duo whose profession was to steal babies. On Monday, the Thane crime branch caught this duo along with an accomplice Vijay Srivastav for stealing a newborn infant from Thane civil hospital a day earlier, from their Netajinagar residence at Pisavli, Kalyan east. The cops also rescued five other children from the house of these ‘baby thieves’.

The afternoon of January 15 brought much relief to Mohini Bhovar, 19, who delivered a baby only to be kidnapped within four hours of his birth on Sunday. Thane police caught the kidnappers within 34 hours of the crime.

On the evening of January 13, at 10.15 pm, Mohini a resident of Bhiwandi was admitted to Thane civil hospital for labor. Around 10.56 pm, she gave birth to a baby boy and both of them were shifted to the maternity ward of the hospital on the ground floor. 

“At around 2-2.30 am, a woman approached me and said that my mother, who was waiting outside the ward, wanted to see the baby and took him out,” says Mohini. “I was too tired after the labor and let her take the child while the hospital staff was still around,” she says. Mohini raised an alarm at around 3.15 am, when the woman did not return with the baby. 

“We went through the CCTV footage at the hospital, railway station and other places, and after technical analysis our team went to Kalyan on January 15,” says Madhukar Pandey,  Joint Commissioner of Police, Thane. “There we caught the accused, along with four other children,” he says.