Location: All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, India (2012) 🇮🇳
The Story: In January 2012, a 15-year-old girl stumbled into a Delhi hospital carrying a brutally injured two-year-old, later named Baby Falak by the staff. The toddler was barely clinging to life, suffering from a fractured skull, severe brain damage, bite marks all over her body, and both her arms broken. The teenager claimed to be the mother, but her story quickly unraveled. Falak's case became a national obsession, with the country holding its breath as doctors fought to save her. 👶
The Twist: The investigation revealed a nightmarish, sprawling underworld. Falak was not the teenager's child. She was a commodity in a vast human trafficking ring. Her biological mother had given her to an agent, hoping for a better life. Instead, Falak was passed through a chain of strangers—a man who sold her, a woman who used her to beg, and finally to the teenager's abusive boyfriend, who inflicted the final, near-fatal torture. The 15-year-old "mother" was herself a victim of trafficking and rape. The horror of the case was not a single monster, but a systemic, faceless network of greed and cruelty that could reduce a child to a disposable object, exposing a hidden India where innocence was bought, sold, and broken long before Falak reached the hospital. 🤕