Indian police found a 50-year-old American woman chained to a tree in a forest in the western state of Maharashtra, where she said she Her Indian husband left her to die.
Maharashtra police told CBS News that the woman, identified as Lalita Kayi Kumarwas found in a forest in Sindhudurg district, after local shepherds heard her cries for help and alerted the authorities.
Photos and videos shared by Indian media showed an emaciated woman dressed in baggy, tattered clothing being helped by rescuers in the middle of a forest, with one of her legs secured to a tree with a metal chain.
A 50-year-old woman from the US was found chained to a tree in a forest in Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district on Monday. Her name is Lalita Kayi Kumar S, she is from the US and lives in Tamil Nadu. Police believe that her husband locked her in the forest after a domestic dispute pic.twitter.com/XXm6lxjBg9
— Yusuf Bhandarkar (@BhandarkarYusuf) July 30, 2024
“When we discovered her, she was severely dehydrated.. It appears she was trapped there for at least 48 hours, though she was mute,” said Amol Chavan, an inspector at Sawantwadi police station and a member of the squad that tracked her down.
Police had to cut down the tree and break the padlock holding the woman captive, Chavan said.
After rescuing her, police took Kumar to a hospital in Sindhudurg and she was later shifted to the Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour at the Goa Medical College and Hospital. Police said that doctors treating her had informed them that suffered from extreme psychosisbut was “out of danger” from a medical point of view.
He wrote a note to reveal everything
A video broadcast by Indian television channel India Today showed doctors surrounding Kumar in a hospital bed as she wrote a note to tell her story. In it, she says she cannot speak and alleges that her husband left her chained in the jungle to die.
“Injection for extreme psychosis which resulted in a severely locked jaw and inability to drink water. Required intravenous feeding. 40 days without food or water. My husband tied me to a tree in the forest and said I would die there“, the note said.
A 50 year old American woman Lalita Kayi Kumar, was found tied to a tree with an iron chain in a jungle in Maharashtra, India, where she had been held captive by her Indian husband for 40 days.
She had come to India a decade ago to learn yoga and meditation, police said on… pic.twitter.com/wKR2w8tIx0
— Gurpreet S. Sahota (@GurpreetSSahota) July 31, 2024
Police recovered a photocopy of Kumar’s US passport, an Indian identity card and other documents from her possession. They have filed a case of attempted murder against her husband, named Satish, the police inspector in charge of the investigation, Vikas Badave, told CBS News.
“We registered a case of attempted murder on July 30,” Badave said, adding that officers “They have very little information about her husband at this time”.
She added that Maharashtra police had sent a team to Tamil Nadu state, several hundred miles away in southern India, in search of her husband, as the woman’s Indian identity card refers to an address there. Police were also trying to find her relatives.
Badave told CBS News on Thursday that officers had not been able to record a formal statement from Kumar as doctors had advised against doing so so far.
Police said they were in touch with the US embassy in India. regarding the case, but the embassy declined to comment when contacted by CBS News.
Indian media outlet NDTV reported that an expired Indian visa was found in the woman’s US passport, suggesting she had lived in India for 10 years.
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