The An­ti-Kid­nap­ping Unit (AKU) is in­ves­ti­gat­ing the dis­ap­pear­ance of a 15-year-old girl from her home in Barataria on Thurs­day af­ter a $5,000 ran­som was lat­er de­mand­ed for her safe re­turn.

The girl, who lives at Sixth Av­enue, Barataria, is a Form Two stu­dent at a sec­ondary school in San Juan.

The child’s 35-year-old moth­er re­port­ed her daugh­ter miss­ing at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 9:45 pm on March 6.

The girl, of African de­scent, was last seen at around 3.45 pm that day, when she left home to re­port­ed­ly at­tend rug­by prac­tise at school.

Her moth­er be­came con­cerned around 7 pm af­ter her daugh­ter failed to re­turn home.

Hav­ing con­tact­ed the rug­by coach at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 8 pm, the moth­er learned that no prac­tice had been sched­uled for that day, and nu­mer­ous calls to her daugh­ter’s phone went unan­swered.

The moth­er lat­er went to the Barataria Po­lice Sta­tion and filed a miss­ing per­son’s re­port.

At ap­prox­i­mate­ly 12.47 am on March 7, the moth­er re­ceived a text mes­sage from the vic­tim’s phone, de­mand­ing a ran­som of $5,000 for the girl’s safe re­lease.

Fol­low­ing this, of­fi­cers lat­er vis­it­ed the girl’s home and in­ter­viewed sev­er­al peo­ple, ob­tain­ing cer­tain in­for­ma­tion that they were pur­su­ing up to yes­ter­day.

The miss­ing girl was last seen wear­ing a white T-shirt with a Los An­ge­les print on the front, black long tights, and black shorts.

—AN­NA-LISA PAUL