Thiruvananthapuram:
A 33-year-old man, who was missing for the past 12 years, has been traced by Kerala Cyber Police after tracking his activities on an Internet social networking site, a top police official said on Wednesday.
Jimmy Koruth was taken into custody in Chennai last week, State Crime Records Bureau IG Tomin Thachankery told reporters. This was the first case in the country where a missing person was tracked down with Internet help, he said.
He said Jimmy had been missing since November 1998 from his native place Pandalam when he was a final year degree student at Mar Ivanios College here. A case was registered at Pandalam police station, but investigations reached dead end.
Recently, one of Jimmy's relatives came across his profile on Internet social networking site Orkut and informed Pandalam police, which handed over the case to the Cyber Cell.
Jimmy had not posted his photograph on the site. After contacting Google International in the US, the Cyber Police learnt that Jimmy's profile was created in 2008 from a cyber cafe in Chennai, which was later found closed.
Police traced the e-mail used for creating the account and collected the user's mail access details and usage history and found out that he frequented an Internet cafe at Adayar.
His father identified him from the images recorded by security cameras at the cafe, Thachankery said.
Jimmy, who was brought here, told police that he had been working in several firms in Goa and Chennai all these years and was happy about 'positive turn of events'.
He stated that he did not want media to publish the reason for leaving Pandalam.