The Versova police have arrested a 27-year-old resident of Uttarakhand for allegedly making video calls to women and displaying himself in obscene positions.
The complainant in the case, a Mumbai-based actor, told The Hindu that while she received the first call in July, an FIR was registered only in August.
“I got an audio call on WhatsApp for the first time in June and ignored it. But the call kept coming throughout the month of July. On July 21, while I was in a meeting, I received three to four video calls in a row and finally picked it up. It took me full ten seconds to register what I was seeing and hearing,” she said.
She tried to file a complaint online but did not succeed. Meanwhile, she continued to get the video calls, sometimes as many as four to five a day. On August 3, she shared her ordeal with some of her friends and to her shock, one of them spoke of similar harassment. Realizing that the matter was serious, the actor contacted Versova police and was told someone would come down to record her statement.
“We waited for hours but nobody showed up. Finally, we went to the police station ourselves and an FIR was filed on August 4. I also took to Twitter, sharing my ordeal, and the delay in investigation,” she said.
The investigating team obtained details of the number from which the calls were made, and found it was registered to a woman in Uttarakhand. A team, led by police sub inspector Safdar Sheikh, went to Berinag village in Uttarakhand, where they worked with the local police for over a week. After finding out that the woman in whose name the SIM card was registered had nothing to do with the offence, the police started tracing the location of the cell phone.
“The police officers from Berinag helped us locate the accused, who was found staying in a remote village with minimal transport facilities and poor cellular network. We picked him up on Thursday and brought him to Mumbai on Friday,” Mr. Sheikh said.
The accused, identified as Rajendra Kumar Bahadur Ram (27), has been charged with outraging a woman’s modesty under the Indian Penal Code along with relevant sections of the Information Technology Act. He has claimed after initial questioning that he found the SIM card and started calling numbers at random to confirm if the user was a woman before making video calls, said investigating officers.
