New Delhi: The horribly skewed sex ratio in some UP districts is making its presence known in Delhi as a dozen girls were abducted over the past eight months from the railway stations here to be sold off as brides in UP.

Men in UP, who were unable to find wives, bought the girls for as little as Rs 40,000-60,000.

A police investigation uncovered the role of a married couple, Arvind and Anjali, in the abduction and sale of the girls. Arvind was later arrested along with two other men, who had each bought a girl and married them off forcibly.

Ravindra Yadav, Joint CP (Crime), informed that two abducted girls had been already rescued, which included a minor girl. Efforts are on to trace and rescue seven other identified victims.

According to the police, the couple was working for Ravi Pandit, a notorious criminal based in Muzaffarnagar. Pandit's hideouts were raided by the police, where they found and arrested Arvind, though Pandit himself is still on the run.

A dozen such kidnappings and forced marriages were revealed by Arvind, after which, a team hurried to a Muzaffarnagar village. There, they rescued a 14-year-old girl, and arrested her 'husband' Narender.

Two Jharkhand sisters—a 19-year-old girl and her cousin—had gone missing from the Old Delhi railway station on October 5. It was in the process of investigating this disappearance that the Delhi Police Crime Branch had gotten wind of the trafficking racket.

The 19-year-old managed to place a secret phone call to the police and provided them with her Muzaffarnagar location, which led to her rescue. She was freed from the house of a man named Sandeep, whom she had been forced to wed. While Sandeep was arrested, the location of the girl's cousin remains unknown.