Meerut 29 :- A 22-year-old postgraduate engineering student at IIT-Jammu was arrested on Wednesday after a woman accused him of rape, disrobing herself on a bustling road in Agra in broad daylight after the cops allegedly did not act on an FIR she filed 18 days ago.
The accused and the survivor knew each other from their undergraduate studies at a college in Agra, police said.
The woman, a year junior to him, claimed that he abducted her and raped her in a moving car.
“Despite the FIR being lodged 18 days ago, I was compelled to run from pillar to post to get the accused arrested,” the survivor said.
Previously, she had lodged a harassment complaint against the accused on July 29, but the SHO said that the investigation did not uncover any supporting evidence.
A video of her stripping in protest was widely circulated on social media, prompting the police to arrest the accused. She was subsequently taken to a mental hospital for observation, where she stayed for three days.
ACP Suraj Rai told agencies, “An FIR was lodged on Aug 11 at Sikandra police station under BNS sections 64(1) (rape), 127(2) (wrongful confinement), and 352 (criminal intimidation). The survivor’s statement was recorded in the city magistrate’s court, leading to the arrest of the accused. She accused him of both sexual and mental harassment.”
In her FIR, the survivor alleged that the accused had abducted her and raped her in a car before abandoning her on a road. She expressed that the accused had ruined her reputation, making it difficult for her to marry.
She demanded that the police punish him by stripping him naked in front of her, as she claimed he had done to her.
However, a senior police official involved in the investigation raised doubts about the survivor’s claims. “Call detail records (CDRs) and notebooks recovered from her possession suggest that she may have been on good terms with the accused. The notebooks contained the accused’s name repeatedly, and the CDRs revealed frequent texting from woman with no response from the accused. The investigation will reveal the truth,” the official said.
(The victim’s identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme Court directives on cases related to sexual assault)
(AGENCIES)
