The Gujarat unit of the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) on Monday arrested five persons for allegedly hatching a conspiracy to extort ₹8 crore from a retired IPS officer by preparing and circulating a false affidavit to claim he had raped a woman.
The suspects allegedly tried to implicate a former senior police officer of the State in a fake rape case in order to extort money from him.
According to the ATS officials, the mastermind of the case, G.K. Prajapati has turned out to be an executive committee member of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) OBC cell. The ruling party immediately suspended him from the party as soon as his name came out in the extortion racket.
After the ATS in a media briefing disclosed the names of the accused, the ruling party suspended Prajapati from the primary membership for “misconduct.
According to ATS officials, Prajapati is the mastermind while four others are identified as his aides Haresh Jadav and Mahendra Parmar and two Gandhinagar-based journalists Ashutosh Pandya and Kartik Jani. All five were arrested.
The State police had swung into action after an affidavit filed by a woman was circulated in which she claimed to have been raped by a senior IPS officer of the State at his residence. The affidavit was circulated and had gone viral on social media platforms.
As per the affidavit signed by the 33-year-old married woman, the former police officer had raped her twice under the pretext of helping her with a criminal case registered against her brother.
The woman had first filed a rape case against one Ismail Malek at police station of Gandhinagar last month.
Prajapati and his aides tried to use the case to extort money from the former police officer and got signatures of the woman in blank pages and then wrote about the former IPS officer.
After they failed to extort money from the former officer by using the false affidavit, they used two journalists to circulate the contents of the affidavit on social media platforms to bring the pressure on the retired police officer.
