A woman who appeared in a viral TikTok video claiming to have been “kidnapped” might be the same girl who was abducted 18 years ago, according to police.
In the viral footage, Mexican journalist Oscar Zazueta is seen interviewing a young woman in a plaza in Culiacan.
He asks her in Spanish if she is looking forward to her next birthday and her answer left him shocked.
She replied in Spanish: “I’m not happy about it, because I have a lot on my mind.
“In all honesty, I don’t like my birthday. It shocks me each time I have another one.
“I want to say hi to my auntie and my nana.
“And I want them to come to get me because I’ve been kidnapped.”
The journalist then lets the camera keep rolling as the woman continues her incredible story and says she wants to be reunited with her family.
“Yes, they say I was kidnapped. Maybe from Italy, maybe from Japan,” she says.
“I hope they come for me. Because in reality, I don’t know where I’m from – from here, or from there. And now I’m in Sinaloa.”
When the footage was initially uploaded on TikTok, many people did not believe the young woman was telling the truth and said it was a hoax.
But police in the US are now desperate to find her because her appearance is similar to that of Sofia Juarez who was abducted from her home in Kennewick, Washington, when she was just four years old.
Sofia was last seen playing in her bedroom at around 9.15 pm on February 4 in 2003, the day before her fifth birthday.
Lt. Aaron Clem, from Kennewick’s police department, told NBC News: “This is one of those cases that everybody in our community knows exactly what they were doing when she went missing.
“The ultimate goal is to get her identified and have her voluntarily give us a DNA sample.
“There is enough there that we need to do our due diligence.”