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HomeIndiaMarried Vizag woman feared drowned spurs hunt by Coast Guard & Navy,...

Married Vizag woman feared drowned spurs hunt by Coast Guard & Navy, is ‘found with lover’

Visakhapatnam-based Sai Priya was reported missing while at RK Beach Monday to celebrate second marriage anniversary with husband Srinivas Rao.  

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Hyderabad: When a frantic husband approached Visakhapatnam Police on 25 July, to report his wife missing — he feared she had drowned off the RK Beach during a romantic getaway — a massive search operation ensued.

Besides the police, the Navy and the Coast Guard stepped in as well, and a helicopter was deployed to scan the expanse of the sea for the missing woman.

It was a search that was never to yield results.

Forty-eight hours into the search, the police was informed, 21-year-old Sai Priya was already over 1,000 km away. Not dragged in by the waters of the sea, but allegedly in Bengaluru, with her lover.

Inspector Korada Rama Rao of the Three Town police station, where the missing person complaint was registered, said it was “a routine affair that when anyone goes missing near the water, all of our teams jump into action”.

“We cannot delay it to such an extent where we don’t even find the body, in worse cases,” Rama Rao added. “Similarly, here too, we deployed all our resources.”

It was her parents who informed the police about her whereabouts, after receiving a text message from Sai Priya in which she confirmed her location, the police officer said.

“She sent a message to them saying she is in Bengaluru with another male friend she is romantically involved with,” Rao added. “She likes him and they wanted to be together. She also told the parents not to search for her or ask her to come back.”

While the search for Sai Priya ended with a twist no one saw coming, sources in the Vizag Police department said the probe into her “disappearance” will continue until the police ascertains that she is where she claims to be and how she ended up in another city.

Married for two years

Visakhapatnam-based Sai Priya has been married for two years to Hyderabad resident Srinivas Rao, and they were reportedly at the beach Monday to celebrate their second wedding anniversary.  

“We were at the beach together and I got a message, so I just moved aside a bit and was busy on my phone. I just looked back and she disappeared. I searched everywhere and could not find her,” Srinivasa Rao told reporters Monday evening.

Rao added that when he filed a missing person’s complaint at Vizag’s Three Town police station, he was told that CCTV cameras affixed at RK Beach had been “non-functional”.

Confirming the sequence of events, Inspector Korada Rama Rao told ThePrint: “We filed an FIR on 25 July only and immediately deployed teams to conduct search operations. The more we delayed, the worse it could have been.”

At least 20 police personnel, along with a team of the Indian Navy and a chopper, were pressed into action to find Sai Priya. The rescue operation went on for 48 hours and concluded late Wednesday when, according to Inspector Rama Rao, the police found out that Sai Priya was in Bengaluru.

(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)


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