In yet another case that shows how brazen the cattle-theft mafia seems to be increasingly getting, a gang of masked men abducted a woman from the house in which they had broken into for stealing cattle.

The woman managed to free herself from the thieves, who dropped her on the road around two kilometres from her house.

The incident happened on the intervening night of 17 and 18 March, in Samanpura village of Haldharpur Thana area of Uttar Pradesh’s Mau district, which is near Varanasi.

A first information report (FIR) has been registered based on the woman’s statement against one identified and a few other unidentified men.

Mau Superintendent of Police (SP) Anurag Arya told Swarajya over the phone that the named accused has been arrested and is being questioned. Arya, however, declined to share the accused’s name or even the IPC sections under which the accused has been booked.

Arya said the accused belongs to the same village as the survivor, and the gang committed the crime after the woman “resisted” theft of her cattle.

According to the survivor, she woke up at around 2 am to drink water when “four-five” men “whose faces were covered with black cloth” forcibly pushed her inside their pick-up van.

“They covered my mouth with their hands and forced me into their vehicle. I saw them pushing our cow inside the vehicle as well,” she said.