UP police in K’taka to nab youth under anti-conversion law

KEY STORY

• GORAKHPUR: Uttar Pradesh dispatched a three-member police team to Karnataka’s Bijapur late on Wednesday to arrest a Muslim youth booked in Gorakhpur under the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance 2020 for allegedly kidnapping a local teenage girl for marriage and forcing her to convert.

• According to an FIR lodged at Chiluatal police station in the district on January 11, the Karnataka-based man used a job offer to befriend the girl and concealed his religious identity till the time he allegedly kidnapped her. The couple is yet to be traced.

  “The girl’s father reported her missing on January 5 and charges under the new anticonversion ordinance were added after the girl’s call records showed she had been in touch with the accused, Mehaboob Chapparband, for over a year,” Chiluatal SHO Neeraj Kumar Rai said.

   

• The girl’s father said he had escorted his daughter till Sardar Patel Institute of Technology in Gorakhpur on January 4, but she didn’t return home that night. “I later found out she knew Mehaboob via Facebook since November 2019.” Mehaboob is from Lachhan village under Indi rural thana in Bijapur.

CONCLUSION

• Vijayapura SP Anupam Agarwal told TOI from the district headquarters on Thursday that UP police had contacted their counterparts in Indi rural police station to intimate them about the case lodged against Mehaboob under the state’s new anti-conversion law.

• It transpired that the accused hadn’t been seen in his village lately. “We are also trying to find his location. As of now, the information we have shared with UP police is all we have,” Agarwal said.