THANE: Two days after 7-year-old Diva resident Sakshi Vijaykumar Pandey was reported missing, she was reunited with her family on Monday. Six teams were formed to trace the girl and footage from 940 CCTV cameras at railway stations between Diva and Badlapur was scanned before she was found in the residence of a 35-year-old human resources (HR) executive who lives in Badlapur, police officers familiar with the case told Hindustan Times.(Getty Images/iStockphoto)“The HR executive is himself the father of a sexual assault survivor, and he had taken Pandey home after finding her alone at Diva railway station as he did not want her to be exploited by someone,” said Anu Sharma, the investigating officer in the case.After the girl was rescued, doctors at a government hospital examined her and ruled out any possibility of sexual assault, Sharma noted.According to the police, Pandey’s family had relocated from Delhi to Diva in January and her father works at a rangoli manufacturing unit in Bhiwandi, earning around ₹13,000 per month. She has three sisters and a brother, none of whom are enrolled in school owing to the family’s poor financial situation.After the 7-year-old girl went missing around 8:30pm on Thursday, her parents searched for her the entire night before approaching the Mumbra police on Friday. Once the missing complaint was filed, the police inquired with residents of the area and scanned footage from multiple CCTV cameras. The footage showed her roaming through different parts of Diva before waiting at platform number one Diva station around 10:37pm. She was then seen speaking to a man, and boarding a Kalyan-bound local train with him.Following this lead, six teams were formed under the guidance of assistant commissioner of police Priya Damale and senior police inspector Anil Shinde. The teams scanned CCTV footage from Kopar, Dombivli, Thakurli, Kalyan, Vitthalwadi, Ulhasnagar, and Ambernath railway stations, and found that the man and the girl had alighted from the train at Ambernath and taken another train to Badlapur, where they alighted around 12:15am.The police then scanned CCTV footage from Badlapur railway station and showed photographs of the man and the girl to local auto-rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers. One auto driver identified the man as a regular commuter and directed the police to his residence. When the police knocked on the man’s door, Pandey was having dinner with him and his three children.The man – who works as an HR executive with a logistics firm in Mumbra and has three children aged nine, seven and four – had taken Pandey home in good faith, the investigating officer said.“The girl had told him a false story – that she was from Delhi, had no parents, and had got lost after boarding the wrong train. As the HR executive is a single parent and he was in a rush to cook dinner for his kids back home, he took the girl to his house instead of immediately taking her to the nearest police station,” a police officer said..The HR executive and his wife had undergone separation about a year-and-a-half ago owing to differences over childcare and family responsibilities, and he had been taking care of their three children since, the officer said.Once home, the HR executive called his mother, an Anganwadi helper in Bhiwandi, and narrated the entire incident. She suggested they could take the girl to the police on Sunday, when she had an off, and the girl could stay at home with his children in the interim.“The HR executive’s seven-year-old daughter is herself a survivor of sexual assault. So he did not want the girl to remain alone on the platform,” said Sharma.Though the HR executive was briefly detained on Monday for questioning, he has not been booked or arrested as he appears to have acted in good faith, was already the father of a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) victim, and medical examination had confirmed that Pandey had not been sexually assaulted, Sharma said.