NEW DELHI, June 24: In a breakthrough for a case with no eyewitnesses or CCTV footage, a seven-year-old Labrador Retriever named Mary led Uttar Pradesh police to the doorstep of a man accused of raping a six-year-old girl in Sambhal.
The victim was kidnapped while playing outside her home on June 19 and was later discovered in nearby bushes. While police and forensic teams collected evidence from the site, including a gamcha (towel), initial questioning of residents yielded no leads.
Sambhal Superintendent of Police (SP) Krishna Kumar Bishnoi said that the neighbourhood had no CCTV cameras or eyewitnesses to the incident. Although the police questioned the people in the surrounding area, no relevant information was found.
With the investigation hitting a dead end, the police brought in Mary, an expert tracker. After sniffing the towel left at the scene, Mary tracked the scent through narrow lanes and stopped at a house less than 400 metres away.
“She looked up at her handler. The signal was unmistakable,” the police statement said.
Mary has been in service with the Sambhal police since December 2019. “Mary is not the youngest in active duty, but she had something many younger dogs lacked—patience, precision, and an uncanny ability to hold a scent trail even in chaotic urban environments,” SP Bishnoi said, noting that she was the “gold medalist” of her training batch.
The canine has a distinguished track record, having previously helped police recover a body in a murder case in the jungles of Bilaspur and solving another murder involving a deaf person in Baniyather. (PTI)
