KASARGOD: The Kasaragod district police detained a woman who had been hiding for 13 years after being booked in a Juvenile Justice Act case for assaulting her son, but ended up reuniting the woman with her two children after the son told the court that he was withdrawing the case.
Police said the woman’s estranged husband had decided to settle scores with her by framing her in the case, forcing the children and the mother to live apart for so many years. When the investigating team tracked her down on October 21, she was attending to an elderly patient at Tiruvalla as a caregiver.
The district police have taken up a special drive to resolve old cases, especially those involving crimes committed against children. As part of that, the investigating team took up the Juvenile Justice Act case — filed in Chittarikkal police station in 2013 — in which the accused woman had gone into hiding after being released on bail. The Muslim woman, 44, had changed her name to Amaya after marrying a Hindu man and lived in Cheemeni, Kasaragod.
At the time of the alleged incident, the couple had a 12-year-old son and a younger daughter and she ran a tailoring shop at Kambalur near Chittarikkal. One day, while she was at work in the shop, the man dropped their children there. Later that day, he brought his son to Cheemeni police station with a complaint that the boy’s mother assaulted him. The officers at the station refused to register a case, suspecting foul play as they had settled a marital dispute between them earlier.
The man then took the boy to Chittarikkal police station since the tailoring shop where the alleged assault happened lay within their jurisdiction. Chittarikkal police charged Amaya under Section 75 of the Juvenile Justice Act and arrested her. Amaya was released on bail after her relatives came to her rescue. Thereafter, she disappeared.
The latest probe traced the woman to a home-nursing agency in Ernakulam.
The police team brought Amaya to Kasaragod and produced her before the court on October 22. Her son, now aged 25 and married, told the court he was not willing to pursue the case any further. He has filed an affidavit in the court, which is likely to quash the case in the next hearing scheduled on November 20.
After spending two days with her son and daughter, Amaya decided to return to Tiruvalla. Kanhangad DySP M V Anilkumar, who headed the team, said absconding persons detained by police are usually lodged in prison but the court considered Amaya’s a special case. Her son submitted that he had not realised that his father was using him to settle scores with his mother, the officer said.