Representative imageKottayam: Two expatriate friends hoping to have a good time on a short visit home ended up giving a sleepless night to themselves, and the police. A Facebook post by one of the two men sent the police on a search-and-rescue operation for a damsel in distress.
It all started when an Idukki native who work in Qatar decided to go on a night-out along with his buddy, another expatriate in the United States.
The two men got drunk in a hotel room near the KSRTC bus station in Kottayam and went outside in search of some night life after 10 pm. The man from Idukki chatted up someone near the bus stand and got a woman’s phone number. He called her up for an appointment. When she met him at another location in town, she told him that she was a widow and was trapped into sex trade by a relative. When they parted, the sympathetic expatriate gave away a hefty amount of money to the hapless woman.
Things did not stop there. It turned out that the other friend had a much larger heart. He too wanted to meet the woman when his friend shared the nocturnal adventure with him. He called her up and offered her everything she could wish for, including a place to live in. The woman had other ideas. She cut the call and switched off her phone, leaving the friends with mental images of a woman trapped somewhere in the filthy underbelly of the town.
One of them turned to Facebook for help. He wrote that a woman aged about 23 years was trapped by a sex racket and nobody was willing to help her, sending the social media circle into a tizzy. The post grabbed the attention of a few cops, who set off a search for the woman immediately.
Special Branch Deputy Superintendent of Police S Suresh Kumar, West Circle Inspector P V Baby and Sub Inspector M J Abhilash combed the town. Two other teams followed leads in Ernakulam and Palakkad.
The police examined the woman’s phone number and found out that it belonged to someone in Andhra Pradesh. The call details suggested that the woman had vast connections over south India.
When the police zeroed in on the woman after 24 hours, she confessed to duping the expatriate friends. The mother of a nine-year-old said she was all well and had no complaints.
The police then turned to the whistle blowers, who told them that they resorted to social media after the woman went incommunicado. They said they had removed the Facebook post after they sensed that things were getting out of hand.
They were later let off without registering any case.
