'It took 32 years, but I finally found my kidnapped son'

Li Jingzhi spent more than three decades searching for her son, Mao Yin, who was kidnapped in 1988 and sold. She had almost given up hope of ever seeing him again, but in May she finally got the call she had been waiting for.

At weekends Jingzhi and her husband would take their toddler Mao Yin to the zoo, or to one of the many parks in their city, Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province in central China. And one of these outings has always remained especially vivid in her memory.

"He was about one-and-a-half years old at the time. We took him to the Xi'an City zoo. He saw a worm on the ground. He was very curious and pointed to the worm saying 'Mama, worm!' And as I carried him out of the zoo, he had the worm in his hand and put it close to my face," Jingzhi says.

Li Jingzhi and her son embrace for the first time in 32 years. Getty Images

Mao Yin was her only child - China's one-child policy was in full swing, so there was no question of having more. She wanted him to study hard and be successful, so she nicknamed him Jia Jia, meaning "great".

"Jia Jia was a very well-behaved, smart, obedient, and sensible child. He didn't like to cry. He was very lively and adorable. He was the kind of child that everyone liked when they saw him," Jingzhi says.

She and her husband would drop him off at a kindergarten in the morning and pick him up after work.

"Every day, after leaving work I played with my child," Jingzhi says. "I was very happy."

Jingzhi worked for a grain exporting company and at harvest time she would have to leave town for several days to visit suppliers in the countryside. Jia Jia would stay at home with his dad. On one such trip, she received a message from her employers telling her to come back urgently.

"At that time, telecommunications weren't very advanced," Jingzhi says. "So all I got was a telegram with six words on it: 'Emergency at home; return right away.' I didn't know what had happened."

She hurried back to Xi'an, where a manager gave her devastating news.

"Our leader said one sentence: 'Your son is missing,'" Jingzhi says. "My mind went blank. I thought perhaps he had got lost. It didn't occur to me that I wouldn't be able to find him."

This was October 1988, and Jia Jia was two years and eight months old.

Jingzhi's husband explained that he had picked up Jia Jia from the kindergarten and stopped on the way home to get him a drink of water from a small hotel owned by the family. He had left the child for just one or two minutes to cool the water, and when he turned around Jia Jia was gone.

Jingzhi assumed he would quickly be found.

"I thought perhaps my son was lost and couldn't find his way home and that kind-hearted people would find him and bring him back to me," she says.

But when a week had passed, and no-one had taken him to a police station, she knew the situation was serious.

She began asking if anyone had seen Jia Jia in the neighbourhood of the hotel. She printed 100,000 flyers with his picture on them and handed them out around Xi'an's railway and bus stations, and placed missing person adverts in local newspapers. All without success.

"My heart hurt... I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream," says Jingzhi. "I felt as though my heart had been emptied."

She would cry when she saw her missing son's clothes, his little shoes, and the toys he used to play with.

At the time, Jingzhi was unaware that child-trafficking was a problem in China.

The one-child policy had been introduced in 1979 in an attempt to control the size of China's rapidly growing population and alleviate poverty. Couples living in cities could have only one child, while those in rural areas could have a second if the first was a girl.

Couples who wanted a son to carry on the family surname and take care of them in old age could no longer keep trying for a boy; they would face stiff fines and their additional children would be denied social benefits.

The policy is believed to have contributed to a rise in the number of child abductions, especially of boys. But Jingzhi knew nothing about this.

"Sometimes on TV, there would be notices about missing children, but I never thought that they had been abducted and sold. I just thought they were lost," she says.

Her first instinct, on learning about Jia Jia's disappearance, was to blame her husband. Then she realised that they should work together to find their son. As time went on, though, their obsession meant that they rarely talked about anything else, and after four years they divorced.

But Jingzhi never stopped searching. Every Friday afternoon when she had finished work she would take the train to surrounding provinces to look for Jia Jia, coming home on Sunday evening ready to return to work on Monday morning.

Whenever she had a lead - news about a boy who looked like Jia Jia, perhaps - she would go and investigate.

On one longer-than-usual trip in the same year that Jia Jia vanished, she took a long-distance bus to another town in Shaanxi, and then a bus into the countryside in search of a couple said to have adopted a boy from Xi'an who looked just like Jia Jia. But after waiting until evening for the villagers to return from the fields, she learned that the couple had taken the boy to Xi'an. So she rushed straight back again, arriving in the early hours of the morning.

Then she spent hours looking for the flat the couple was renting, only to find out from the landlord that they had left two days earlier for another town. So she hurried to that town and when she got there, again at night, spent hours going from one hotel to another, trying to track them down. When she finally found the right hotel, the couple had already checked out.

Even then she didn't give up. Although it was now already the middle of the night again, she travelled to another town to find the husband's parents, but the couple wasn't there. She wanted to go straight to the wife's home town, but by this stage she had gone more than two days without sleeping properly or having a decent meal.

After resting, she set off and found the woman and the child. But to her great disappointment, the boy wasn't her son.

"I thought for sure this child was Jia Jia. I was very disappointed. It had a huge impact on me. Afterwards, I kept hearing my son's voice. My mum was worried I would have a mental breakdown," Jingzhi says.

Her son was the first thing she thought about when she woke up each morning, and at night she dreamed he was crying "Mama, mama!" - as he had before, whenever she left his side.

On the advice of a former classmate who was a doctor, she checked herself into a hospital.

"A doctor said something that had a big impact on me. He told me: 'I can treat you for your physical illnesses, but as for the illness in your heart, that's up to you.' His words made me think all that night. I felt I couldn't go on like this. If I didn't try to control my emotions, I might really go crazy. If I became insane, I wouldn't be able to go out to look for my child and one day if my child came back and saw a crazy mother, it would be so pitiful for him," Jinghzi says.

From that point onwards she made a conscious effort to avoid getting upset, and to concentrate all her energy on the search.

Meanwhile, Jingzhi's sister packed away all of Jia Jia's clothes and toys into a box, as the sight of them was causing Jingzhi so much heartbreak.

Around this time, Jingzhi became aware there were many parents whose children had gone missing, not just in Xi'an but further afield, and she began working with them. They formed a network spanning most provinces in China. They sent big bags of fliers to each other and posted them in the provinces they were responsible for.

The network also generated many more leads, though sadly none brought Jia Jia any closer. Altogether, Jingzhi visited 10 Chinese provinces on her search.

When her son had already been missing for 19 years, Jingzhi began volunteer work with the website, Baby Come Home, which helps reunite families with their missing children.

"I no longer felt lonely. There were so many volunteers helping us find our children - I felt very touched by this," Jingzhi says. There was another benefit too: "I thought even if my child is not found, I can help other children find their home."

Then in 2009, the Chinese government set up a DNA database, where couples who have lost a child and children who suspect they may have been abducted can register their DNA. This was a big step forward, and has helped solve thousands of cases.

Most of the missing children Jingzhi hears about are male. The couples who buy them are childless, or have daughters but no sons, and most of them come from the countryside.

Through her work with Baby Come Home and other organisations over the past two decades, Jingzhi has helped connect 29 children with their parents. She says it's hard to describe the feelings she went through when she witnessed these reunions.

"I would ask myself: 'Why couldn't this be my son?' But when I saw the other parents hugging their child, I felt happy for them. I also felt that if they could have this day, I definitely could have this day too. I felt hopeful. Seeing their child go back to them, I had hope that one day my child would return to me," Jingzhi says.

The moment Li Jingzhi saw her son for the first time in 32 years. CCTV

There have been times, though, when she has almost lost hope.

"Every time a lead turned out to be nothing, I felt very disappointed," she says. "But I didn't want to keep feeling disappointed. If I had kept feeling disappointed, it would've been hard for me to keep living. So I maintained hope to continue living."

Her elderly mother also served as a reminder to keep looking for her son.

"My mum died in 2015 at the age of 94, but before she passed away she still really really missed Jia Jia. Once my mother told me she dreamed that Jia Jia came back. She said: 'It's been nearly 30 years, he should return,'" Jingzhi says.

When her mother fell unconscious shortly before her death, Jingzhi guessed she was thinking of her grandson.

"I whispered in my mother's ear: 'Mum, don't worry, I will definitely find Jia Jia,'" she says. "It wasn't just to fulfil my own wish, I wanted to fulfil my mother's wish and find Jia Jia. My mother passed away in 2015 on 15 January, on the lunar calendar - that's Jia Jia's birthday. I felt that it was God's way of reminding me to not forget the mother who gave birth to me and the son I gave birth to. On the same day, one passed away and one was born."

Then on 10 May this year - Mother's Day - she got a call from Xi'an's Public Security Bureau with the amazing news: "Mao Yin has been found."

"I didn't dare to believe it was real," Jingzhi says.

The reunited family. CCTV

In April, someone had given her a lead about a man who was taken from Xi'an many years ago. That person provided a picture of this boy as an adult. Jingzhi gave the picture to the police, and they used facial recognition technology to identify him as a man living in Chengdu City, in neighbouring Sichuan province, about 700km away.

The police then convinced him to take a DNA test. It was on 10 May that the result came back as a match.

The following week, police took blood samples to do a new round of DNA tests and the results proved beyond any doubt that they were mother and son.

"It was when I got the DNA results that I really believed that my son had really been found," Jingzhi says.

After 32 years and more than 300 false leads, the search was finally over.

Monday 18 May was chosen as the day for their reunion. Jingzhi was nervous. She wasn't sure how her son would feel about her. He was now a grown man, married, and running his own interior decoration business.

"Before the meeting, I had a lot of worries. Perhaps he wouldn't recognise me, or wouldn't accept me, and perhaps in his heart he had forgotten me. I was very afraid that when I went to embrace my son, my son wouldn't accept my embrace. I felt that would make me feel even more hurt, that the son I had been searching for, for 32 years, wouldn't accept the love and hug I give him," Jingzhi says.

Because of her frequent appearances on television to talk about the problem of missing children, her case had become well-known and the media was excited about reporting the story.

On the day of the reunion, China Central Television (CCTV) ran a live broadcast which showed Jia Jia walking into the ceremony hall at the Xi'an Public Security Bureau, calling out "Mother!" as he ran into her arms. Mother, son, and father all wept together.

"That's exactly the way he used to run towards me when he was a child," Jingzhi says.

Jingzhi learned later that Jia Jia had been sold to a childless couple in Sichuan province for 6,000 yuan (£690/$840 in today's money) one year after he was abducted. His adoptive parents renamed him Gu Ningning and raised him as their only child.

He attended elementary school, middle school, and college in Chengdu city. Ironically, he had seen Jingzhi on television a few years earlier, and thought she was a warm-hearted person. He also thought the picture of her son she showed looked like him when he was a child. But he didn't make the connection.

As for who gave Jingzhi the lead about her son's whereabouts, that person prefers to remain anonymous.

After their reunion, Jia Jia spent a month in Xi'an, taking turns staying with his birth mother and father.

During this time, mother and son spent time looking at old photos, which both of them had hoped would awaken Jia Jia's memory of his childhood before he went missing.

But sadly for them, Jia Jia doesn't remember anything that happened to him before the age of four, when he went to live with his adoptive parents.

"This is something that makes my heart ache," Jingzhi says. "After my son came back, he also wanted to find an image or memory of the life he had when he was still with me, but as of now, he still hasn't found it."

Jingzhi also realised, on a visit to a scenic spot in Xi'an, that it is impossible to relive the past.

"That day we went to the mountains and on the way down I said, 'Jia Jia, let Mama carry you.' But I couldn't carry him. He was too big.

"I felt if he could return to my side, we could start all over again from when he was a child, we could fill this 32-year gap. I said to my son: 'Jia Jia can you shrink back to the way you were before? You start at age two years and eight months and Mama will start at age 28 - let's relive our lives all over again.'"

But Jingzhi knows that in reality this is impossible.

Jia Jia continues to live in Chengdu while Jingzhi still lives in Xi'an. Many people have suggested that she should persuade him to return to Xi'an to be by her side, but even though she would love for this to happen, she says she doesn't want to make his life more complicated.

"He's a grown-up now. He has his own way of thinking. He has his own life. Jia Jia has got married and has his own family. So I can only wish him well, from a distance. I know where my son is. I know he's still alive. That's enough."

They are able, anyway, to communicate daily on China's popular social media app, Wechat.

"My son's personality is very similar to mine. He thinks of me a lot and I think of him a lot," Jingzhi says. "After all these years, he's still so loving towards me. It feels as if we hadn't been separated. We are very close."

Jia Jia prefers not to be interviewed and police are not revealing information about his adoptive parents.

As for who took Jia Jia away 32 years ago and how they did it, Jingzhi says she hopes the police will work it out. She wants to see the culprits punished for putting her through 32 years of anguish and changing her life and Jia Jia's.

She is now busy creating new memories with her long-lost son. They've taken many pictures together since their reunion.

Her favourite picture is the first they took together, the day after their reunion, when they spent time alone in a park.

In the picture, mother and son stand side by side, looking like exact replicas of each other, overjoyed finally to be reunited.

Jingzhi says in the past few years thanks to the efforts of the Chinese government and the Chinese media to publicise the problem, the number of child abduction cases has fallen.

But there are still many families looking for their missing children and many grown children looking for their birth parents. And this means there is more work for Jingzhi to do.

"I will continue to help people find their families," she says.

Photographs courtesy of Li Jingzhi unless otherwise indicated

(Source: BBC)

Owen Harding: The teen who disappeared during lockdown

As Britain scrambled to adjust to the first week of a life of lockdown in late March, Owen Harding and his mum Stella were arguing.

The 16-year-old was frustrated that his girlfriend Meg Wells Rhodes was 280 miles away in York, where she lives. It had been an emotional few days. Meg had only just left after a short visit to Owen's home in Saltdean, East Sussex. 

Restrictions on travel had been imposed and it was unlikely the couple would be able to get together again in the near future.

The teenagers didn't see each other regularly because of the distance, but Owen found the new uncertainty unsettling.

"I know that I myself was very anxious," says his mum Stella. "And I know that a lot of my friends were very anxious as well, and feeling a lot of grief about not being able to spend time with each other."

Owen lives with his mum and five-year-old sister in the art deco-era village of Saltdean set on top of the cliffs on the eastern edge of Brighton.

Stella describes herself as "typical Brighton" - a swimming and diving teacher who travelled the world with a backpack and met Owen's father on an Indian beach. He died at home in Geneva two years ago after a sudden illness.

On a video call from the teenager's bedroom, Stella describes her son as "an articulate and wise and mature, emotionally intelligent young man". Going missing was out of character.

Owen's GCSE artwork lines the bedroom walls, along with photos of friends. There are football trophies from his three-year career with Woodingdean Wanderers.

Owen and Meg's families became friends through Britain's burgeoning community of parents who choose to home school their children. Meg is taught at home, and Owen had previously attended Brighton Waldorf School, one of the Steiner School network of providers of alternative education, before beginning art and film studies A-levels at a sixth form college.

The pair had known each other since they were 11 but had only become a couple two years ago.

Owen wanted to spend the lockdown with Meg, and had joked with her and his friends that he might make the journey north. But his mum was adamant that this was not going to happen.

"It was like this ongoing discussion all week. That was really, really tricky between us," she says.

On Thursday 26 March, the argument flared again, and as the evening sun illuminated the South Downs, Owen left the house without saying a word to his mother. CCTV pictures show the teenager walking south, down Bannings Vale in Saltdean, towards the cliff top at 18:13.

The distance to the cliffs is less than half a mile. The eastern edge of Saltdean sits next to Telscombe Tye, a scrubby expanse of grass popular with walkers that marks the meeting of Brighton's eastern suburbs and the South Downs. There are only a few hundred yards of grass beyond the coast road before the Tye stops at the Sussex chalk.

He made a phone call to Meg after he left the house. "He said that he'd just had a big argument with his mum," she says. "And I was upset as well because I had just had an argument with my mum about the same thing. And then we just sort of cheered up and and he said he was just going to watch the sunset."

It was the last time anyone has reported having spoken to Owen.

Cell site records show that Owen's phone was connected to the mast at the top of Longridge Avenue, which runs from the downland behind Saltdean to the coast road and the cliff top. At 18:23 it was disconnected.

Meg made a further call to her boyfriend at 18:32, but it went straight to voicemail. Unaware of this, Stella was not concerned. 

"We live by the sea, we live next to the Downs. We go walking a lot. He just went out, off he went and I just thought: 'Well, good, go and get your allocated daily exercise.

"'Go and stomp it off, go and get it off your chest and then you'll come back.'" But by late evening she had become worried. She contacted friends in Saltdean and Meg's family in York. Around 23:00 she contacted the police.

Meg and her parents rushed back to the south coast the following day and the families began searching on the Downs behind Saltdean, and along the coast as far as Newhaven. They called in at abandoned farmhouses, shouting Owen's name.

A huge police operation was quickly organised. About 80 officers visited homes and businesses near the Hardings' bungalow. But the lockdown made the operation more difficult. Police were occasionally frustrated by people not answering doors, and shops that might have been able to provide CCTV pictures had closed because of the lockdown.

But police did give residents who owned security cameras police memory sticks. They were left in packages outside houses and later collected by officers.

Before long, a huge support campaign had sprung up - one that continued to honour social distancing rules.

"Saltdean is an amazing community," says Stella. "We don't all know each other, of course, but it's an amazing community.

"So as soon as the people in Saltdean heard that there was a teenager missing, everybody was talking about it. People started putting up posters on [the] Friday. And everybody was on board."

A social media operation found volunteers to create a website and Facebook pages. Celebrities including BBC Radio 2 breakfast presenter Zoe Ball and YouTuber PewDiePie, who both live in Brighton and Hove, posted appeals online.

Simon Watson, a retired Metropolitan police sergeant trained in search techniques, who lives on the Hardings' road, offered to organise a methodical search. Teams of between 10 and 20 people, working in household groups where possible, combed the grassy cliff-top area at Telscombe Tye, and the scrubby countryside behind the houses in Saltdean.

Watson had drawn up full risk assessments and briefed the volunteers before each search - with a strict reminder to maintain a social distance. Acknowledging the difficulties of the case because of the current situation, he said the community had remained resolute.

"I know from experience you can have hunches. But it's quite tricky, this one, because of the real lack of information."

Stella set up a small camp in the front garden of her 1930s bungalow, including a small statue of Buddha. She says this is a space for her to rest and reflect.

Neighbours talk to her from the path, offering words of comfort and support. And friends gave her a wood-burning oven so she could keep warm on the nights she spent sleeping outside waiting for her son.

"Fire and sleeping on the ground, and deep breathing and lots of walking and being outside. They are all things that sort of nourish me and comfort me, so that's why I'm doing that.

"And I also had this thing in my head, 'If I light a fire and I just keep it going, it's like a kind of beacon and Owen will come home.'"

But she misses human contact. "Everybody just wants to hug me. 

That's what they want to do. And I want that. So that that is really, really hard right now."

Det Insp Mark Rosser of Sussex police has conceded that the searches have found no evidence of Owen alive. "Pretty much all that we can do has been done," he says.

His last hope is that combing through CCTV from buses travelling on the coast road might show the teenager at the time he disappeared.

When Owen was last seen, the tide below the cliffs at Saltdean was low at sunset, and the wind a strong north-easterly.

Police enlisted an oceanographer, Dr Simon Boxall of the University of Southampton, who concluded that the conditions at the time would have carried a body out to sea rather than carrying it east or west along the seafront. DI Rosser's officers have been searching the coast as far east as Dungeness in Kent, and have alerted colleagues in mainland Europe.

Stella says she doesn't know whether her son is alive or dead, but she and Owen's girlfriend Meg were prepared for the possibility there had been a tragedy on the cliffs.

"I think that we've all been prepared for that since the moment he went missing," she says.

"He has a five-year-old sister who adores him, and is aware of his absence. She keeps asking when is Owen coming back, and my heart is aching at the possible thought of having to tell her that he is not ever coming back.

"What it feels like is that I'm kind of teetering on the edge of the precipice above a massive bottomless canyon of grief.

"And I don't know if I can actually allow myself to jump into it, you know, like, I want to."

(Source: BBC)

Kidnapping of small children on the rise in South Africa

As hopes of finding missing Sydenham school boy Miguel Louw continue to dwindle‚ police are chasing leads that he may have been trafficked.

A 44-year-old man‚ who cannot be named‚ appeared in the Durban Magistrate’s Court on Monday facing charges of human trafficking.

The man had originally been charged with kidnapping‚ and this grim change of tack by Organised Crime Unit detectives probing Louw’s disappearance gives a glimpse into what may have befallen the boy.

Bianca van Aswegen‚ for NGO Missing Children SA‚ said that abductions were on the up and only 1% of child trafficking victims were ever found.

“Kidnappings have been on the increase and we have seen that in our own numbers. This has also become synonymous with random demands‚” she said.

“Not only girls are vulnerable but boys are in danger as well. Whether or not trafficking is at the heart of each kidnapping is difficult to say and we would have to look at it on a case-to-case basis‚” she added.

Trafficked children are often used as prostitutes or slaves. 

Image: Thinkstock

Van Aswegen said that the spectre of human trafficking was a global issue.

“They [trafficked children] are often used in this country as prostitutes or slaves or they cross borders for the same purpose. To say the least it is a grim life is an understatement and only 1% of human trafficking victims are ever found and that is incredibly sad.”

“People should never wait 24 hours before reporting and this window is the most crucial when anyone goes missing. People still think they need to wait and that should never be the case‚” she added.

It is believed that the boy was taken from his school‚ located less than a minute from his home‚ on the afternoon of July 17.

According to Miguel's grandmother‚ Arlene Paul‚ CCTV footage placed Miguel at a KFC next door to his house with a man‚ who had been an acquaintance of the family for about two weeks‚ on the day of his disappearance.

Since his disappearance‚ his relatives have frantically taken up the search‚ canvassing shelters‚ hospitals and the state mortuary.

Police are also investigating the disappearance of Mfundo Hlope who disappeared from his home in the Mfekaye Reserve in northern KZN.

On Monday police released an appeal for information after 15-year-old Nomphumelelo Campbell disappeared from her school in Ladysmith.

(Source: Times Live)

My photo was circulated as child kidnapper on WhatsApp': Telangana man narrates ordeal

The man approached local police and filed a complaint against the person who had spread the fake message.

It was in mid-May that Jetti Yadaiah, a shepherd from Manajipet village of Khilla Ghanpur mandal in Telangana's Wanarpathy district, saw his own photos being circulated on WhatsApp.

"Initially, I didn't care much. The message was accompanied with photos of two more of my friends, Srinivas and Sontam Raju, along with a voice message," Yadaiah narrates, as he herds his sheep through a green field.

The voice message stated that the three people, including Yadaiah, were moving from one village to another in an attempt to kidnap children and later kill them. The message also called for people to immediately kill the men in the message, if seen, and to forward the ‘warning’ to at least 10 other people.

As the message began spreading, Yadaiah feared for his life. "Suddenly, I realised that the message had spread to local groups in my village itself. I made several calls and found out who put the messages. When I confronted him, he first denied that he did it, but later said that he did not assume that it would go so viral. When I asked him to say this publicly, he refused," Yadaiah says.

"When we confronted him again, he claimed that someone else had sent it from his phone and when we called that person, he abused us," he adds.

Both the accused in the case were minors, who later said that they did it as a 'joke'.

On May 26, Yadaiah approached the local police and filed a complaint, requesting necessary legal action against the accused for spreading fake messages and instigating people to kill him.

Based on the complaint, Khilla Ghanpur Sub-Inspector Vijay Kumar then registered a case under Section 504 (Intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) of the Indian Penal Code and relevant sections of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1932 and Information Technology Act.

"As part of our job, we travel from one place to another to graze the sheep. Sometimes we even cross the Telangana-Andhra Pradesh border and come back. In such a time, if someone were to see us sleeping in the field and attacks us, who would be responsible? We haven’t been leaving our village since the message has spread," Yadaiah says, "While I managed to get some friends and their acquaintances to delete the messages, I have no idea how far it has gone and how many people have seen it."

Cracking the case
Speaking to TNM, SI Vijay Kumar said that as soon as they filed a case, they began investigating.

"He (Yadaiah) showed us the message and said that two people from his own village had forwarded it. He also said that he was scared to go out because he might be attacked due to the fake rumours doing the rounds on social media," Vijay Kumar narrates.

"We summoned the two boys and asked them how many people they had sent the message to. They said they forwarded it to another five people. We deleted the messages at the source first. After this, we spread a message through the media that this was fake and asked people not to believe it," he adds.

The police then confiscated the phones of the two accused and produced them in front of the Juvenile Justice Board, which sent them to a juvenile home. 

"We then visited the village and tracked most of the people who received the message and made them delete it as well. In this way, we managed to avert a major tragedy. We also stepped up our awareness programmes in all the villages which come under our jurisdiction," Vijay Kumar states.

"Our staff worked relentlessly and specifically worked with the youth and asked them not to spread such messages. Within one week, we were able to quell all fears and brought the situation under control. Thanks to preventive steps, we were able to act before any incident occurred, rather than reacting after an incident," he adds.

Tackling a larger problem
The local police could act swiftly, thanks to Rema Rajeshwari, Superintendent of Police of Jogulamba Gadwal district, who also holds additional charge of Wanarpathy district.

The IPS officer had noticed a spike in fake messages doing the rounds on WhatsApp early in April and successfully managed to avert a major crisis.

While one message referred to an interstate gang of thieves, another mentioned a gang that was kidnapping children. A third kind were communally sensitive messages written in Hindi.

Rajeshwari had assigned Village Police Officers (VPOs) to consistently visit a few villages in their jurisdiction in order to gain the trust of the locals.

By making sustained efforts and also holding training programmes for the police officers and undertaking awareness campaigns for the locals, she managed to educate people on identifying fake news which was being circulated.

"People were taking advantage of this mass hysteria and were trying to take revenge on people with whom they had enmity with in the past. In Yadaiah's case, it actually put him at great risk. He could have been killed," Rajeshwari tells TNM, “However, because the policemen had gone to his village as part of a campaign, he knew that he could report it to us and sought our help," she adds.

"We had been seeing such messages for a while now about child kidnappers but when I saw my own photo, I was really scared. It just spread rapidly. Despite the swift police action, I'm still a little scared to go out anywhere. I feel like I'm not as free as I used to be," Yadaiah says.

(Source: TNM)

Bengaluru woman ‘kidnapped’ by drunk Ola driver, quick thinking saves her

This is the second such incident in Bengaluru in a month, a woman had been earlier forced to disrobe and pose for pictures on the same route.

A 30-year-old woman headed for the airport in an Ola cab was allegedly attacked and abducted by the driver in Bengaluru on Wednesday night. The woman was rescued after she was heard screaming and banging on the window by toll-gate officials and motorists near KIA toll plaza on Ballari Road.

The driver, Suresh, 28, a native of Andhra Pradesh is a resident of Banaswadi in the city. He was booked by police officials for outraging the modesty of a woman, kidnapping and driving under the influence of alcohol.

The alert toll-gate officials who rescued the woman pulled out the cab driver and called the police control room. Police officials from Chikkajala police station took the accused into custody.

The woman is a resident of Indiranagar and is employed in a private company. She had booked the cab from Banaswadi to go to Kempegowda International Airport around 11:30 pm. Police officials at Chikkajala police station confirmed that the cab supposed to take her to the airport was instead heading for Devanahalli. "She sensed something was wrong when the cab did not take the route to the airport and instead headed towards Yelahanka junction. She claimed that the driver did not slow down and was instead going at a high speed at the junction" a police official at Chikkajala police station told TNM.

Image for representation

The woman revealed that she was rescued by motorists who noticed her at the KIA Toll Plaza on Ballari Road. "We had crossed the ramp leading to KIA. I noticed the toll plaza since the car had slowed. This was the last opportunity to save myself. I hammered on the window glass and started shouting. To my good fortune, a couple of motorists, mostly cab drivers, noticed me. They chased our vehicle for nearly 400 metres, blocked it and pulled the driver out,” she said speaking to Times of India.

"She showed great presence of mind to alert motorists and toll-gate officials because after that point, for some time,there are not many places where vehicles are asked to stop. It appears the driver was under the influence of alcohol when this incident occurred," said the police official.

Ola meanwhile has released a statement that said, "We are deeply disturbed to know about the incident. The cab involved has been removed from our platform. We are extending all needed support to the customer. Additionally, we are also engaging with the police to lend assistance in their ongoing investigation."

The incident comes just over a month after a Bengaluru-based architect was allegedly held hostage, forcibly made to disrobe and had nude photos clicked by an Ola driver. The driver also threatened to call his friends and gang-rape her. On that occasion too, the victim was heading to the airport late in the night.

Recently, an Ola spokesperson confirmed to TNM that drivers are not formally trained on subjects like gender sensitivity and sexual harassment but are provided “online modules” which they must go through. The terms and conditions for Ola’s partners/cab fleet mention a ‘Zero Tolerance Policy’ – except it does not mention sexual harassment.

(Source: TNM)

The FBI said I was my parents' stolen baby - but I found the truth

When a one-day-old baby, Paul Joseph Fronczak, was stolen from a Chicago hospital in 1964, the terrible story made headlines across America. Then, two years later, an abandoned boy was identified as the missing baby and handed over to the relieved parents. Years later, Paul began to investigate what had happened - and was shocked by what he found.

Paul Fronczak was 10 when he went hunting for Christmas presents in his parents' basement. He pushed aside a sofa to get into the crawl space. There, he discovered three mysterious boxes full of letters, sympathy cards and newspaper clippings. One headline read: "200 search for stolen baby." Another: "Mother asks kidnapper to return baby." He recognised his parents in the pictures, looking distraught and much younger. Then he read that their baby son, Paul Joseph, had been kidnapped.

"Wow, that's me!" he thought.

It was a sensational tale. On 26 April 1964 his mother, Dora Fronczak, had given birth to a baby boy in the Michael Reese hospital in Chicago. She had nursed the baby throughout the day - when he wasn't sleeping with other babies in the nursery. But the following morning a woman dressed as a nurse came into Dora's room and took him to be examined by a doctor. She never returned.

Hospital staff realised something had gone wrong, and a frantic search was soon under way. However, the hospital didn't notify the authorities - or the baby's parents - until that afternoon. At 3pm they called the father, Chester Fronczak, at the factory where he worked as a machinist.

"My dad had to leave work, go to the hospital and tell his wife that the baby was missing," says Paul. "You think you're safe - you're in a hospital - and that's where your baby is kidnapped."

The biggest manhunt in Chicago's history was then launched, involving 175,000 postal workers, 200 police officers and the FBI. They had searched 600 homes by midnight, but to no avail.

Excited by his discovery, Paul ran upstairs with a handful of clippings to ask his mother if they were about him.

Dora reacted angrily, telling him off for snooping. Then she admitted: "Yes, you were kidnapped, we found you, we love you, and that's all you need to know."

Paul knew not to bring up the subject again, and he didn't - for another 40 years.

But his curiosity was not satisfied and often, when he was alone in the house, he would sneak back into the crawl space to read more.

***********

That was how he learned about the next part of the story - how he came to live with the Fronczaks.

After the kidnapping, Dora and Chester stayed in hospital for a week, waiting for news. When they returned home, they were hounded by the press. Despite all the publicity, there were no credible leads - their baby had disappeared without trace. The investigation was quietly shelved.

Then, in March 1966, nearly two years later, Dora and Chester received a letter from the FBI - a toddler had been found in Newark, New Jersey, who matched their son's description.

The boy had been abandoned in a pushchair in a busy shopping centre the previous July and had been placed with a foster family, the Eckerts. They had baptised him Scott McKinley and were so fond of him they were considering adopting him.

Before they could, however, a New Jersey police detective had the idea that the boy might be the missing baby from Chicago.

A social worker holds the little foundling with a bruised
face - soon to be baptised as Scott

The FBI began to test that hunch. There wasn't much to go on - there was no record of Paul Joseph's blood type, nor had the hospital taken the baby's fingerprints or footprints. All they had was a single photograph taken on the day he was born - and the shape of the baby's ear in that picture was very similar to that of the abandoned toddler.

"They ended up testing over 10,000 boys that could possibly be Paul, and I was the only one they couldn't fully exclude," says Paul.

The Fronczaks were elated to hear the news. "Back then the FBI was the elite authority, and when they tell you something you believe it," says Paul.

Three months later they drove from Chicago to meet the boy who might be their son in the offices of the New Jersey children's services. All three had been put through a series of psychological tests before the meeting. Dora and Chester had also had to be approved to adopt the child now officially known as Scott.

"An FBI agent walked me in and they let us get acquainted for a while," says Paul. "My mum had only spent less than a day with her son before he was taken out of the hospital. And then, years later, she sees this child."

Dora has since told Paul that she felt the world was watching her.

"She could either say, 'I'm not sure,' and put this child back into the system, or say, 'Yes, that's my son,' - and even if it was not, save this child from what could be a horrible life."

Dora said it was her son.

"She did what she thought was right, and I'm glad she did," says Paul.

They took him to Chicago and formally adopted him.

**********

The Fronczaks were loving parents, if - understandably - over-protective. Sometimes, that led to clashes. Paul was sent to a Catholic school with a strict dress code, but he liked rock music and wore his hair long.

Once, during a heated argument over the length of his hair, Dora said: "I wish they'd never found you."

That stuck with Paul. "Even to this day just thinking about it, I feel it in my soul," he says.

Paul with long hair

After graduating from high school, Paul left home to be a bass player with a rock band in Arizona. Five years later, when the band broke up, he returned to Chicago but soon got restless and joined the army for a year. Afterwards he moved around, working as a salesman and, later, as a model and actor. Eventually he settled in Las Vegas.

"I moved probably at least 50 times in my life and I've had well over 200 jobs. And no matter where I go or what I do, I've always had those paper clippings with me," he says.

In 2008 Paul married for the second time and soon he and his wife, Michelle, a teacher, were expecting a daughter. Paul was delighted. But when the obstetrician asked about their families' medical histories, it hit Paul that he wasn't really sure how to answer.

Ever since finding out about the kidnapping, he had wondered if he was really his parents' son.

"I actually thought: 'What are the chances of me being this one baby taken from Chicago?'

"I was found so far away, it just seemed so unfathomable."

He had always felt that he did not fit in. His parents seemed closer to his younger brother, Dave. They were all quiet and reserved, whereas Paul liked loud music and fast motorbikes. They looked different, too.

"Dave looked exactly like my dad - mannerisms, facial expressions, the body-build, everything. And I looked like neither."

Paul with his father, Chester, and brother, Dave

Now the question began to haunt him - was he really the stolen baby?

"For years I had wanted to do a DNA test with my parents," says Paul. "Not because I wasn't happy, I just wanted to know the truth. I had always found a reason not to do it - I didn't want to hurt them - but there came a point when I needed to know."

He had also been put off by the expense. But one day in 2012 Paul spotted over-the-counter DNA kits for sale and bought some.

When his parents came over from Chicago for a visit, Paul plucked up the courage to broach the subject, about an hour before they were due to leave.

"Have you ever wondered if I'm your real son?" he asked. Caught by surprise, his parents admitted that they had. "Would you like to find out?"

Minutes later, everyone had swabbed their cheeks and the kits were sealed. Then Paul took his parents to the airport.

But by the time their plane landed a few hours later, Dora and Chester had changed their minds. They rang Paul, asking him not to send off the kits - he was their son, and that was the end of it.

"I kept those samples in my desk drawer for a couple of weeks," says Paul. "I wrestled with that every day because I love my parents, I wanted to respect their wishes, but sometimes you just have to do what you feel is right. How can you be wrong, trying to find the truth?"

So he sent the samples off.

He was at work when he got a phone call about the results. After answering some security questions he was told there was "no remote possibility" that he was Paul Fronczak, Dora and Chester's biological son.

"I just felt like my life as I knew it was ended. I felt the colour drain from my face. I couldn't think. I got all sweaty," says Paul.

"Everything I thought I knew about myself - my birthday, my medical history, being Polish, being Catholic, even being a Taurus - went out the window, and for a second I didn't know who I was."

The results raised two urgent questions. Who were Paul's parents, if not Dora and Chester Fronczak? And what had happened to the real Paul?

Before he had even told his parents the news, Paul called a local investigative journalist, George Knapp, to ask for help. Soon Paul Joseph Fronczak was a national news story once again.

His family - who shunned the media - were furious, and didn't speak to him for over a year.

"You've got to understand, the main reason I did this was to find my parents' real child," says Paul. "They were the most amazing parents. The best gift I could give them would be to find their kidnapped child, and I thought the best way to do this would be to invoke the help of the media."

One consequence of going public was that the FBI reopened the Fronczak kidnapping case. They had located 10 boxes full of original case files in Chicago - but because the DNA results proved that he was not the stolen baby, Paul had no right to see any of it.

He did, however, speak to one of the retired FBI agents who worked on the original case, Bernie Carey, who admitted that some of the team had not been convinced they had found the right child.

Paul had more luck with the search for his biological parents.

A team of volunteers called the DNA Detectives took on the case free of charge. Led by the genetic genealogist, CeCe Moore, they used a combination of DNA testing and classic investigation techniques: searching newspapers and public records, trawling through social media, and endless phone interviews.

Paul meets the genealogists working on the case - Michelle Trostler,
CeCe Moore, Allison Demski and Carol Rolnick

Although Paul had been found in New Jersey, they traced his family to Tennessee. Meanwhile his DNA test had revealed Ashkenazi Jewish roots.

"I knew one side of the family had to have a Jewish grandparent," says Moore.

But there were also many setbacks. It was months before they made their breakthrough - a conversation with one of Paul's potential relatives, who mentioned that there were some missing twins in the family.

"That's when we knew we were finally heading in the right direction," says Moore.

Genealogist Michelle Trostler in front of the "wall of stickies"
she assembled for the case

It was on 3 June 2015, two years after they had begun their investigation, that she spoke to Paul on the phone.

"What do you think of the name Jack?" she asked him.

Paul said, "It's a strong name. It's a good name."

Moore said, "Well that's your name."

That was how he found out he was born Jack Rosenthal, and that he was six months older than he had always thought - his new birthday was 27 October 1963.

And there was a kicker: he had a twin sister, Jill. But she, like him, had vanished. So now Paul had a third person to find.

"I don't think you could hear that you have a twin, and not seek that person for the rest of your life," says Moore.

**********

Meeting his relatives was exciting at first.

Paul, who had always been drawn to music, was delighted to discover that his cousin, Lenny Rocco, was a musician too - he had been a doo-wop singer in the 1950s.

"To me, that really proves that you don't have to be raised by your real parents to have those same qualities and traits - like musical ability, I was never exposed to it, but I was drawn to it," says Paul.

"I've played in bands all my life, and when I got to meet my real family, I got to sit down and play with Lenny's band."

Paul and his cousin, Lenny Rocco

Moore, who has reunited thousands of families, sees this kind of thing all the time.

"People meet each other that were raised in completely different households and there are so many similarities," she says.

"It's not just how they look, it's the choices they've made in life - who they've married, what they've named their children, what occupation they chose, even down to the oddest details, like the password on their phone. I do believe that much more is coded in our DNA than we realise - it can't be coincidence."

But not all of his relatives welcomed him with open arms, and Paul soon discovered there was a dark side to his biological family. His mother, Marie, had been a heavy drinker, and his father, Gilbert, had come back from the war in Korea "an angry man".

There is evidence that Paul and his twin sister Jill - who had two older sisters and a younger brother - had been badly neglected. They were always crying, the family says, and one cousin remembers seeing the babies sitting "in a cage".

Nobody knows exactly what happened, but whenever family members asked about the twins they were told that another member of the family was looking after them - when in fact it seems that no-one was.

Paul thinks that "something tragic" may have befallen Jill, and that that may have prompted the decision to get rid of Jack, "because they couldn't explain just one twin".

In his book, The Foundling, Paul describes the twists and turns of his obsessive - and sometimes daring - search for answers. At one point he digs up the garden of the house where the Rosenthals had once lived, hoping in vain to find the remains of his twin sister.

"My real parents were really not very nice people. I'm thankful that they abandoned me because it allowed me to be with the Fronczaks. They saved my life," says Paul.

Two years after their fall-out over the DNA results, Paul made peace with his adoptive parents, and for the first time he sat down with them to really talk about what happened. Dora told him what she had been through.

"I know now that those events shaped my mum into the way she is today," says Paul. "My mum has this never-ending guilt of handing Paul over to the nurse. Even though she knows that in a hospital that's what you do - the nurse says, 'We need your baby,' you hand the baby over. But it's something that she's wrestled with her whole life."

Dora also gave Paul a photo album and letters that had been passed on by the Eckerts, the foster family who had looked after him for a year and baptised him Scott McKinley.

"My mum had this photo album all my life and had never even mentioned it. It makes me kind of misty because these are the first pictures I have of me being a child. Even my real family have no baby pictures of me - my grandmother had a photo album with all the kids in chronological order, and the page with the twins on it was ripped out."

Paul's father, Chester, died last August, but Paul speaks to his mum every couple of days. Dora will be 82 on 27 October - coincidentally, they now share a birthday.

Dora has mixed feelings about the book. "She wishes that I hadn't been quite so open and honest about everything," he says. "But I wrote an honest book."

Paul is as determined as ever to find out what really happened to Dora's son. He still has a private investigator working on the case, and says the next step is to exhume a body.

In fact, he wants to exhume two bodies.

"We have a really strong lead on a possible biological Paul - and the other is possibly my twin sister."

Exhumation is a complex and costly process, but Paul is undeterred. There are still many unanswered questions.

"The story is by no means anywhere near finished," he says.

He and his second wife are now divorced, although still good friends. Paul admits that his obsession with the investigation may have contributed to their break-up.

"It got to the point where every waking minute I was doing something involved with this search," he says. He regrets nothing, however.

"This was something that I had to do. It has made me feel more at peace."

It has also helped him to understand things about himself, such as why he could never seem to settle down.

"The first couple of years of my life really shaped who I am: I'm able to walk away from anybody, any job, any situation and never look back. I think that's part of having three childhoods, three identities at such a young age. It's about adapting. It's about survival. It's about getting to the next day."

CeCe Moore also wonders how all this affected the young Paul. She is curious about what happened to him in the months when he was reportedly being examined by the FBI.

"What made them come to the conclusion that he was Paul Fronczak? Were there signs of trauma that perhaps were misinterpreted as a baby that had been kidnapped, rather than a baby that had a somewhat abusive life?" she asks.

Paul and his daughter, Emma

Paul's daughter, Emma, is now nine - she thinks it's funny to call him Jack, and sometimes does, to tease him. But he has decided not to change his name yet.

"I'm going to stay Paul until they find Paul. The day I find Paul, I'm going to hand him his birth certificate, and I'm going to claim mine."

Paul Fronczak was a guest on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2

Paul Joseph Fronczak is co-author with Alex Tresniowski of The Foundling - the true story of a kidnapping, a family secret, and my search for the real me.

He would like to hear from anyone who might have information about his case, through his website.

All photographs courtesy of Paul Fronczak unless otherwise stated

The FBI declined to comment.

(Source: BBC)