Patna, May 20 (IANS): A man, who lost his job in the second wave of coronavirus, abandoned his wife at Bihar's Buxar railway station on Thursday, police said.

Vivek Verma, a native of Mirzapur under Bariya police station in Uttar Pradesh's Ballia district, had recently married his Facebook friend Pragati Singh, a native of Arihauli in Kushinagar police station in the same district.

"Verma, working for an MNC company in Pune, secretly tied the knot with his Facebook friend Pragati Singh and both went to Pune. They stayed for a few weeks in Pune before the company where he was working, removed him from the job in the second wave of coronavirus," said Ravi Shankar Singh, an investigating officer of Government Railway Police, Buxar.

"Both Verma and Pragati decided to return home. They reached Buxar on the Pune-Patna express on Thursday. After reaching Buxar, he told her to stay at the railway station while he arranged for a vehicle to go to Ballia. Pragati waited there for hours but he did not return. When he was contacted on phone, he said that he would never go to Ballia," the police official said.

He said that the local police has been asked to put Verma's mobile phone under surveillance in a bid to trace him, while a vehicle was arranged to send the woman to her family in Ballia under police security.