For the past six days, Chandrakala has been spending sleepless nights in her shack at a community school at Mechinagar Municipality in Jhapa district, after her only teenage daughter left home without telling her.

Chandrakala’s husband went to Saudi Arabia to work as a labourer and has been out of contact with the family for the past five years. Nor does he send home any money, according to her.

Chandrakala raised her daughter alone and has been taking care of her education by working as a daily-wage worker in the village.

“I had dreamt of making her a doctor and did all to give her a good education,” said Chandrakala, 37, mother of the 13-year-old sixth grader.

The mother’s toil has taken its toll on her health. She says she spends around Rs5,000 a month on heart medications.

The girl had left home at 2pm on February 23 without informing her mother. After her attempts to contact the daughter failed, a panicked Chandrakala aided by her brother filed a missing person complaint in the evening at the Area Police Station Urlabari.

“Our investigation found that the girl had left for Kathmandu on a night bus from Dhulabari the same evening,” said Ashok Koirala, senior sub-inspector at the police station in Urlabari.

Two days later, on February 25, the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB), searching for Chandrakala’s daughter in coordination with the Metropolitan Police Range, Lalitpur arrested Chinese national Yang Limping, 49, from Bungmati.

The police have charged Yang, a permanent resident of Xiamen in China’s Fujian province, with hostage-taking of girls including Chandrakala’s daughter and two others aged 14 and 17. He has also been accused of sexually abusing the victims in his rented apartment in Bungmati. The three girls were rescued.

On the same day, the police also rescued four more minors whom Yang had kept at a Thamel-based hotel.

The police have secured permission from the Lalitpur District Court to keep the Chinese in detention for three days for investigation.

According to the Lalitpur Police Range, the detained Chinese has been operating a business named Coca New Purey and Mattress Company Limited in Bungmati for the past seven years. The firm, which makes prefab products, sprawls over a hectare of leased land.

Of the other two girls rescued from his Bungmati apartment, the 14-year-old is an orphan while the 17-year-old was living alone as her mother is abroad and the father out of contact, according to police.

“The [Bungamati] apartment where he had kept the girls captive has two rooms and an attached bathroom. It was an untidy apartment that stank of cigarette smoke. The girls were kept in the bigger room and in the other smaller room, we found several used condoms. It is apparent that he would sexually assault the girls in that room,” said Superintendent of Police, Prabin Pokharel, also the spokesperson at the Metropolitan Police Range, Lalitpur who is leading the investigation.

Police investigation shows Yang would contact underage girls from poor financial backgrounds, mainly from outside the Valley, through Facebook, and bring them to Kathmandu with promises of financial assistance. He would buy them clothes, gifts, cell phones and sexually abuse them.

Meanwhile, Chandrakala, in her phone conversation with the Post, said her daughter came into Yang’s contact through her neighbour, a 25-year-old woman, who now lives in Kathmandu.

“Only recently did I learn that the man was in contact with my daughter for the past two years. He would top up her mobile phone regularly, but she never told me,” said Chandrakala from Mechinagar Municipality on Tuesday.

Mechinagar Deputy Mayor Mina Pokharel said the municipality is making arrangements to help Chandrakala’s daughter to continue her education in a safer environment in Kathmandu.

Meanwhile, Chandrakala said she is arranging money to visit Kathmandu to meet her daughter, who is currently at a safehouse of Maiti Nepal.

Senior Superintendent of Police Siddhi Bikram Shah, who is also the chief of the Police Range in Lalitpur, said they studied the phone call details of the accused and found that there are over two dozen other underage girls in Yang’s contact. “But the girls are unwilling to come forward out of fear,” said Shah.

Chandrakala says the internet has been a curse for poor mothers like her who are unable to protect their children who are full of “ambitions and materialistic desires” from online predators.

“I heard the police have rescued more girls like my daughter. I demand the harshest possible punishment for the sexual predator,” she said.

(Some names have been changed to protect people’s privacy)