1 week Ago
Vadodara: A man wanted for human trafficking was arrested by detection of crime branch (DCB) sleuths while trying to flee the country. Vakil Ahmed was nabbed at the Mumbai airport when he checked for a flight to Bangkok. Ahmed, a resident of Delhi, was brought to the city by police for investigation.
Vadodara police had issued a look-out circular (LOC) for Ahmed after his name cropped up in a human trafficking case registered here last year. The complainant in the case, a resident of Odisha, had come into contact with the prime accused, Manish Hingoo, and his accomplice, Krishna Pathak, through WhatsApp. Hingoo was later arrested by city crime branch in coordination with the National Investigation Agency (NIA) last year.
Police said Hingoo had promised the complainant a job in Vietnam. The complainant then came to Vadodara and met him at the UES office in Subhanpura. Hingoo gave him a job offer letter from a company called Delta in Vietnam and told him that he would get a computer operator's job.
The accused went to Vietnam a couple of months ago. This was when Pathak told him that the company had closed down. Pathak assured him that a local agent named Vicky would get him another job and took the complainant to Cambodia.
There, the complainant's passport was taken away by Vicky, who took him to the premises of an unnamed company. He was given the task of chatting with Indians, befriending them and siphoning off money from their bank accounts by lure or threat. When the complainant refused to do this work, a Chinese man working for the unnamed company demanded $2,820.
The man threatened to sell him to another company for $2,000 if he didn't pay up. He was asked to get the money from relatives in India and was threatened saying he wouldn't get his passport back. The complainant was locked in a room for over 34 days and harassed mentally by the gang in Cambodia.
"Ahmed is complicit in the human trafficking case. We will seek his custodial interrogation," a police official said. Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with EID Wishes , Messages and quotes !.
