KATHMANDU - Amid increasing incidents of lynchings triggered by suspicions of kidnapping, Nepal police Friday said they had rescued an abducted young woman who was being taken across the border to India.

Isha Bhattarai, from Jhapa district on the Indo-Nepal border and a second-year student in the Padma Kanya Campus, was abducted from a busy area of the capital Thursday while she was going to college, police said.

The young woman told police she was surrounded by a group of people who overpowered her and gagged her with a cloth that probably contained chloroform or a similar substance.

The powerless student was then reportedly loaded into a van from the Dilli Bazar area where she had been staying with relatives.

Police rescued her Thursday night from Amlekhganj in the border district of Bara. She was being taken to Birgunj town in the Indo-Nepal border.

The incident occurred even as Nepal’s new government tabled its policies and programmes for the financial year in parliament Thursday, pledging to improve the security situation and impose severe punishment to deter kidnappings.

Kathmandu Valley is still simmering with protests by students after two youngsters were lynched this week when locals mistook them as kidnappers.

There is growing involvement of Indians and border villages in India’s Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are increasingly being used to keep the victims in captivity till their families pay ransom.

Last month, a six-year-old boy who was spirited away from his school in remote Kailali district, was rescued from Lakhipur village across the border to Uttar Pradesh.

A 42-year-old teacher from India’s Darjeeling town is in a Nepal jail for allegedly kidnapping an 18-year-old student, murdering her and then cutting up her body into pieces so that she would not be recognised.