Two-year-old battered baby Falak, whose harrowing ordeal shocked the country, died at AIIMS last night following a cardiac arrest after fighting a grim 58-day battle for life.
The abandoned child, who was admitted to the AIIMS on 18th January with severe head injuries, broken arms, bite marks all over her body and cheeks branded with hot iron, breathed her last at 9.40 PM, doctors said.
“It was unexpected. She was fit to be discharged. All of a sudden, she had a cardiac arrest at nine and we tried to revive her. But then she gave up at around 9.40 PM,” said Deepak Agrawal, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the AIIMS Trauma Centre who has been attending on her from the day she was admitted there.
During her treatment earlier, she had contracted meningitis and underwent five surgeries and had also suffered two heart attacks.
“But she had survived all this and had recovered well,” Agrawal said. “She was doing well. We removed her from the ICU and shifted her to the ward after we found that she had recovered well.
The whole day she used to spend time playing with the nurses at the hospital.
“All of a sudden she had a cardiac arrest. Since she is a medico-legal case, we will conduct a post-mortem tomorrow,” Agrawal said.
The child was brought to the hospital by a teenaged girl, who had falsely claimed to be her mother.
Investigations revealed the shocking story of Falak, her two siblings and their mother who were all separated after falling victim to human traffickers.
Falak’s mother Munni was tricked into a second marriage by three women out of whom two — Laxmi and Kanta Choudhry — were arrested.
The trio had promised that her three children will be taken care of but they were left to different people.
Ten people were arrested in the case, including the man who had abandoned the child with his teenaged girlfriend.
Police traced Falak’s five-year-old brother from the house of a vendor in West Delhi’s Uttam Nagar locality while her sister Sanobar was traced by Delhi Police to Muzaffarpur in Bihar.
On 15th Februray, Falak was reunited with her 22-year-old mother Munni, who was married to a man in Rajasthan.
