Jamshedpur: A deaf and mute boy, with chains around his neck and wrists, was rescued from the Puri-bound Purushottam Superfast Express at Tatanagar on Sunday night and handed over to Childline India Foundation, a nonprofit that works for children in distress, on Monday.
Preliminary investigations suggest that the unidentified and unaccompanied 16-year-old was abandoned by his kin, but railway police are not immediately ruling out a trafficking angle.
The rescue team was mobilised after a Bhubaneswar-based engineering student, Rishav Raj, tweeted about the shocking sight on Union railway minister Piyush Goyal's official handle.
Tatanagar RPF inspector M.K. Singh said a co-passenger in coach S-8, Anand Vijay Jha, first noticed the boy. "The teenagers was seated in one corner of a seat. He was tied in chains like a criminal. Jha, who had boarded the train from Bokaro for Bhubaneswar, informed his friend Rishav and the latter posted on Twitter," the officer said.
Railway police were alerted around 9.30pm and they rescued the boy after the train arrived at Tatanagar at 10.15pm. "He was in trauma and was first taken to the adjoining railway hospital while we informed Childline," Singh said.
Initially, the railway authorities thought the boy was too traumatised to speak.
"We realised he was deaf and mute, and also mentally unstable, after doctors at the railway hospital in Khasmahal examined him. There were no external marks of injury excepted for the marks left behind by the metal clasps. We handed him over to the NGO and he is currently under medical supervision at MGM hospital in Sakchi," the RPF inspector said.
Railway police are investigating how the minor landed in the train and why he was bound in chains.
"It does not seem to be a case of trafficking, but we cannot draw conclusions as yet. It appears that the boy had been abandoned by his family," an officer said.
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