How a kid bride became a sleaze queen

New Delhi: At 15, this girl from Hyderabad was married off to a man much older to her. No, she had no choice there.

After her parents died, the couple came to Delhi with the dream of finding work and a happy life.

Fate, though, had other plans.

Both of them didn’t find any work. And whatever little money they had with them was exhausted in a month. Soon, the man abandoned her and the young bride was forced to sell her body to stay afloat.

Kotha number 58 of GB Road became her home and Saira became somebody she never thought she would.

Sometime later, one Affaq, a contractor from Moradabad, visited her kotha. He then started to visit her regularly and the two fell in love.

Around the same time, Saira Begum was arrested under Section 8 of the Immoral Trafficking Act for “soliciting and seducing” in public. She was convicted. And that proved to be a turning point of sorts.

Thenceforth, instead of soliciting clients, Saira gradually managed to run a whole racket out of her kotha. That was over two decades ago.

In 1999, Afaq proposed marriage and she accepted it. Afaq then became her Man Friday. Their sleaze business ran without hindrance until 2001. That year, she was arrested for abduction, trafficking and assault after eight girls from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Nepal were rescued from her kotha.

Saira was convicted and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. But Afaq carried on her business.

In 2003, they purchased a kotha (number 57) on the first floor of her previous kotha. When she was released from jail, they restricted their visits to the kothas and began to operate through contacts, police said.

In 2005, personnel from Kamla Market police station raided a kotha (no. 40) and rescued four girls: two from Andhra Pradesh, one from Jharkhand and another girl from Delhi.

Investigation revealed that Saira was running her business from this kotha after police action had brought her previous one under watch. Saira was once again arrested, but this time, Afaq, too, was put behind bars.

But even after this, they refused to mend their ways. Instead, they decided to adopt a whole new modus operandi.

The racket became extremely organised and different people were hired for different roles. It became a well-oiled machinery of sorts.

Six of those people have already been arrested even as a special team led by DCP Bhisham Singh and formed by joint commissioner (

crime

) Ravindra Yadav has been digging deep.

Sources said at least five to six more arrests were likely to happen in the coming days and there could be some explosive revelations.