Team Herald
PANJIM: It's a story that started out like a crime thriller. A frantic man calls the Hyderabad police from London, reporting that his wife has gone missing in the city. But as the police investigate, they discover that she has faked her own abduction and gone off to Goa for a secret vacation with a cab driver, whom she met and started an affair with, on an earlier trip to Hyderabad.
The 35-year-old UK national's sensational story can be traced back to early September, when she was in Alwal, a Hyderabad suburb, where she was vacationing with her children and met the taxi driver. As they interacted frequently and grew close, her Indian-origin husband's family – residents of Hyderabad – alerted him about the developments. He was in the UK, but in the second week of September, he got his wife and kids back to London.
About 10 days ago, the man's mother passed away, prompting him to leave his family in London and fly to Hyderabad for the funeral. Just after this, the woman allegedly abandoned her two children in a London park and flew down to Hyderabad to meet her cabbie 'friend'. When the husband got back to London and found his wife missing, he got in touch with her. It was then that she spun the story about her abduction and even sent a video to him, pleading to be rescued from an unknown location.
When she claimed that the driver in Hyderabad had kidnapped her, the husband reported her disappearance to Cyberabad Police via email and flew back to India right away. After registering a missing person case, when the police began tracking the woman’s movements, they found that she had gone to Goa with the taxi driver. The investigation also revealed that in the period that she had been in London, the two had maintained contact. The abduction story was fabricated and all of it was, in fact, consensual.
Police apprehended the woman and the cab driver as they were returning to Hyderabad. K Balaraju, the SHO of the RGI Airport Police Station in the city, confirmed that the woman had acknowledged that she had not been kidnapped and had chosen to travel to Goa with the driver willingly. Both were counselled, with the woman being sent back to London the following day, and the cab driver being let off with a warning.
All's well that ends well, one could say.