NAGPUR: A student of third year computer engineering, in her mid-twenties, has claimed before police that her former classmate-turned-boyfriend Shubham Bansod, 20, had raped her 108 times. She said he exploited her sexually between 2012 and July this year promising marriage only to retract later. Following her complaint, Ambazari police have slapped Bansod with charges of rape and threatening.

Pratibha (name changed) has also claimed that Bansod had blackmailed her to engage in physical relations misusing some explicit mobile phone clippings. The clippings were of her and a previous boyfriend against whom she had filed a rape complaint at Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh. Pratibha’s mother is a government employee at Saoner and her father has retired from a nationalized bank.

Pratibha also claimed she had retained the explicit clippings in the cell phone’s memory card to use them as evidence for the earlier rape complaint when it shall proceed to trial stage. She stated before police that Bansod had stolen the memory card from her cellphone and accessed the clippings of Pratibha and her previous boyfriend.

The rape survivor claimed she and Bansod had developed affinity for each other while studying together. Already suffering a bad relationship experience in the past, Pratibha had started relying on Bansod for solace.

Police sources stated that Bansod, a resident of Dattawadi, had initially coerced the rape survivor to enter into physical relation after threatening the woman to make the explicit the clippings of her and previous boyfriend public and upload them on different social media. Pratibha claimed that Bansod used the threat to exploit her.

Bansod had physical relations with Pratibha most of the time at his residence at Dattawadi where he stayed with aged grandmother. Their first physical encounter was in a rented a room at Gokulpeth.

It is learnt that Pratibha had met Ambazari police and deputy commissioner of police, Zone-I, Abhinash Kumar repeatedly but had withdrawn her complaint each time. DCP Kumar was instrumental in getting the offence registered when Pratibha met her on Saturday. Bansod is yet to be arrested.

“It is not clear why she was not keen on registering an offence at the last moment after having met the police officials repeatedly. She would file a complaint only to withdraw it later. The woman was convinced to complete the formalities this time,” said a senior official.