A three-year-old Indian girl
has been arrested for armed robbery and disturbing the peace after feuding
neighbours filed a malicious complaint, police said on Thursday.
The girl, who has been identified only by her
nickname Guddi (above), was at home with her family when police arrived in force to
arrest her.
Her family believe the officers had been sent by
local leaders of Uttar Pradesh’s ruling Samajwadi Party, who are locked in a
feud with other people in their village near Jhansi.
When they arrived they demanded the suspect be
brought out for questioning and become increasingly forceful as the family
tried to persuade them there had been a mistake. When the officers insisted and
the parents presented their three-year-old infant, the police realized they
been given false information.
According to her parents, the attempt to incarcerate
her was not the first time she had been accused of armed robbery – charges had
been registered a year earlier when she was two years old. The family had then
been so alarmed by the case that they considered fleeing their village but it
took two months to persuade the police to drop the charges.
Her latest arrest was condemned by the district
magistrate, who said he had ordered the police to withdraw the charges and hold
an inquiry into why they had registered an implausible case against an infant
girl.
Prashant Kumar, the deputy inspector general of
police, said the complaint had been made by the family’s neighbors with whom
they had been involved in a long feud.
“Two families in the neighborhood are involved in
petty fights and have filed police complaints against each other... Both the
families are poor and work as daily wage laborers. Most of the fights were
started when their men were out to work and the women indulged in verbal fights
and at times fist fights”, he said.
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