The Government Railway Police on Thursday rescued 26 minor girls from the Muzaffarpur-Bandra Awadh Express near Gorakhpur after a passenger used Twitter to alert them, PTI reported.
The passenger tweeted that “some of [the girls] are crying and all [are] feeling unsecure [sic]”. He said the girls were possibly “subject to human trafficking”. The superintendent of the Government Railway Police at Gorakhpur promptly referred the matter to the Gorakhpur GRP station.
Officials in Varanasi and Lucknow also got into action and began investigating the matter within half an hour of the tweet, a railway spokesperson told PTI. The Railway Police at Gorakhpur coordinated with the organisation Childline and the anti-trafficking unit of the police.
Two jawans of the Railway Protection Force boarded the train in plainclothes at Kaptanganj, Uttar Pradesh, and took the girls to Gorakhpur.
The girls were found with two men, aged 22 and 55 years, officials said. “All of them are from West Champaran in Bihar,” they said. “The girls were being taken from Narkatikyaganj to Idgah. When questioned, the girls were unable to answer anything convincingly, so they have been handed over to the child welfare committee.”
The men have been arrested and the parents of the girls informed.
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