Search For Missing Woman Concludes For Today

Bob Roberts Reporting

CHICAGO (WBBM) -- Another day of searching along the Des Plaines River Thursday failed to turn up any sign of a missing 24-year-old woman.

Cook County Forest Preserve and Sheriff’s Police are trying to determine their next move in the search for 24-year-old Anu Solanki, a woman from unincorporated Maine Township, near Des Plaines, who disappeared Monday while disposing of a broken Hindu religious statue.

Forest Preserve Police spokesman Steve Mayberry said that 14 officers searched along the Des Plaines River for five and a half hours, starting from Dam 2 near Kensington Road in Mount Prospect to Dam 1, opposite Palwaukee Airport, where Solanki’s Honda Civic was found, still running, Monday afternoon.

Most of the officers searched the six miles of shoreline on foot with two trained dogs. A third dog and police officers traveled up and down the river by boat.

Mayberry said that so far, there is no sign of Solanki or of her missing cell phone, purse and laptop computer. He refused to say whether police now consider this a recovery operation.

Sheriff’s detectives spoke again with several family members, including Solanki’s husband, Dignesh, at the Skokie courthouse.

The family is aiding the search by distributing fliers, and Mayberry said the conversations were held “only for the purposes of gathering information for the missing persons investigation.”

He said that no one has been identified as a suspect or a person of interest in the case, and that no one is in custody on any charges related to the disappearance.

The couple were first married in 2006. The statue had been used in the Solankis’ second wedding ceremony, in Virginia, in May.

It was shipped to them recently and arrived broken.   She had planned to place the statue of the Hindu god Ganesh into the river because she was told that was the “reverent” way to dispose of it.

She last spoke with relatives Monday afternoon, after she completed her work for the day in the gift shop of the Westin

Chicago North Shore Hotel, at 601 N. Milwaukee Av., in Wheeling, and was going to dispose of the statue. In one call, she said she believed that four men were following her. In a follow-up call, she said the men had disappeared and that she would be home soon. No one has heard from her since.

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