A woman in a car was crying out for help in the early hours of Monday. A call to the police control room (PCR) about the incident led to several PCR vans undertaking a high-speed car chase on the streets of South Delhi. Nonetheless, the car that the police officers were chasing managed to give them the slip and the police are yet to gather concrete clues about the matter.
Reports claim that the absence of any complaint of a woman missing or kidnapped in such circumstances has led the police to believe that this could be a case of “dispute between known people”. The police informed that the dramatic event unfolded in the South Extension Part 1 at around 12:35am, after a group of NEET aspirants spotted a grey Hyundai i20 car with two men and two women.
Quoting the students, the police officers said that one man was behind the wheel and a woman was sitting next to him on the front seat. The backseat of the car was occupied by another man and woman. The deputy commissioner of police (south) Chandan Chowdhary narrated that the woman at the back was trying to get out of the car, but the man who was sitting next to her was preventing her from alighting. The woman who was seated on the front seat was shouting for help.
The DCP continued that the student unsuccessfully tried to stop the car, which sped away towards INA. The student managed to note down a Delhi registration number, which they shared with the police later at around 1.15am. The DCP further asserted that they did not find records of any car by this number.
Police further affirmed that a PCR car in the aforesaid area managed to note down the number of a similar car, a Haryana registration number and have sent out an alert on the police radio scanner. After receiving the alert, three PCR vans in the area spotted a car with similar description and commenced a high speed chase from the INA towards Safdarjung at around 1 am. Moreover, the car managed to give police the slip by taking the Barapullah flyover.
Officers at the Kotla Mubarakpur police station checked CCTV footage around the spot from where the students first spotted the car, and the footage appears to confirm what the students had reported. Another police officer mentioned that a camera showed a car, possibly a Maruti Celerio or a Hyundai i10, around 12.35am at the mentioned spot. The car’s front door was open and it appeared that the woman was calling out for help. However, the CCTV had failed to capture the car’s number plate.
DCP Chowdhury mentioned that the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras which issued automatic speeding challans are present on the Barapullah flyover at Sewa Nagar and at the DND Flyover. Chowdhury added that they expected the car to have passed these camera locations at a high speed between 12:45am and 1:30am.
To confirm this, the police suspected that the car at South Extension and the car that the PCR vans chased are the same, but there is no concrete evidence as yet. On Monday evening the police concluded that there is a dispute between the known people.
The DCP asserted that efforts are still being carried on to verify and trace the unidentified woman and it appears that the possibility of it being a case of kidnapping is unlikely. He added that the incident could probably be a matter of some dispute between the known persons.