The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : ‘We are verifying woman’s charge’

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Dec 14, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

‘We are verifying woman’s charge’

Special Correspondent

Victim knew cellphone numbers of those she said attacked her: police

BANGALORE: Preliminary investigation by the Bangalore police have brought to the fore several missing links in an alleged incident of illegal confinement and gang rape of a young woman from New Delhi reported by a section of the media (not The Hindu).

According to a complaint lodged with the Airport police on Wednesday by the 25-year-old woman, a taxi driver picked her in his car from the Bangalore Airport on December 6 when she arrived from New Delhi.

The driver, whom she has named as Sandeep in the complaint, allegedly took her to a service apartment, drugged her, summoned his friends and they gang raped her over five days after illegally confining her, she said in the complaint.

When contacted, Additional Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Bipin Gopalakrishna and Deputy Commissioner of Police (South-East) Soumendu Mukherjee said the Airport police had registered a case and are verifying the veracity of the allegations made by the woman.

Known to her

However, sources in the city police told The Hindu on Thursday that preliminary investigation had revealed Sandeep was her acquaintance and an alleged procurer. Reacting to reports in a section of the media that a group of taxi drivers had allegedly raped the woman, the sources said none of the men whom she has named in the complaint are taxi drivers; instead they are businessmen, industrialists and a television cable operator and some of them are known to Sandeep.

The fact that she has named all of them, given their mobile phone numbers and the number of the car which picked her up in the complaint makes it clear that she knew them, the sources said.

The mobile phone records of the complainant reveal that she had received calls while she was moving in and around Mahatma Gandhi Road, Church Street, Hebbal and other areas during the five days she claimed she was kept in captivity, the sources said.

Interrogation

When the police interrogated those named in the complaint, they claimed that it was not rape but “consensual sex” for which they had paid her acquaintance Sandeep.

The police sources said she reportedly quarrelled with Sandeep over the money and he slapped her upon which she went to the High Grounds police station to lodge a complaint against him. A constable there sent her back saying that senior officials were away at the Chinnaswamy Stadium where the Test match between and India and Pakistan was being played. Later, she approached a journalist with a private Kannada television channel through whom she met Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) B.R. Ravikanthe Gowda and orally complained about the incident, the sources said.

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