Girls who left home with Bollywood dreams traced

With dreams to make it big in Bollywood, four teenagers from the national capital ran away from their homes but were later brought back from Surat by the DCW and the Delhi Police, the women's panel said on Friday.

Two siblings, aged 15 and 17, along with two 14-year-old girls, had gone missing from Kirari on July 3 and subsequently, their parents lodged a complaint at the Prem Nagar police station, the DCW said in a statement issued here.

They also approached 'Mahila Panchayat' which immediately brought the case to the notice of the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW).

The women's panel said it took up the matter with the Delhi Police and a joint team comprising police officials and DCW counsellors was formed, according to the statement.

The parents informed police that the girls had boarded a train from the Nizamuddin railway station.

After scanning the CCTV footage of the station, the team sent photographs and other details of the girls to the Mumbai Police, which then conducted searches in the city.

The DCW counsellors also scanned their social media accounts and found a picture recently uploaded by one of the four girls on Facebook. In the photo, she was seen posing with an unidentified man, the women's panel said.

On July 19, one of the girls reached out to her family and told them that they wish to come back to Delhi and were presently in Surat, it said.

Later, a man also contacted the girl's father and informed him that his daughter and her friends had been living with him for the past 18 days.

The teenagers were brought back by the Delhi Police and were presented before a court. After all the legal formalities, they were later handed over to their parents, a senior police official said.

They told police that they wanted to work in the film industry and after spending a few days in Mumbai, the girls left for Surat where a man took them to his house.

The girls said the man did not torture them and they contacted their families as they got homesick, according to the statement.

Based on complaints lodged by their parents, four FIRs under Section 363 (Kidnapping) of the IPC were registered, the senior police official said.