Laptop has folders with women’s videos: Police

(The victim's identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme Court directives on cases related to sexual assault)

KOLKATA: Cops on Wednesday arrested two persons, members of two prominent Kolkata business families, for allegedly extorting money from women after threatening to make public intimate moments captured with them on video.A cook employed by one of the families was also arrested for involvement in the case that spanned several years, officials said. Video grabs of 182 women have so far been recovered in the three-month investigation.Aditya Aggarwal and Anish Loharuka, along with employee Kailash Yadav, were produced in a local court on Wednesday and sent to police custody till next Thursday on the specific allegation that they had demanded Rs 10 lakh from one of the victims.Aggarwal’s family owns an ethnic-wear retail chain with a nationwide presence; Loharuka’s family owns multiple hot-els in the city. A member of the Loharuka family told TOI that Anish was being “framed”. TOI called up a member of the Aggarwal family on Wednesday afternoon. He, however, disconnected the call when the case was cited; he did not take calls thereafter. Text and WhatsApp messages, too, went unanswered.Joint commissioner of pol-ice (crime) Murlidhar Sharma confirmed the arrests.Officials said on Wednesday that a detailed probe had revealed that the two would “enter into relationships with women and record intimate moments”.A file in Loharuka’s laptop was sent for forensic examination and found to contain 182 folders, each with videos of a different women in “positions of intimacy”, an official said. The clippings date back to 2013.It was about last year that they joined hands with Yadav, a cook in the Loharuka household, who would the women and threaten to release the videos if they did not cough up money, officials said.“The interrogation of the two prime accused revealed that they would befriend women and call them to different locations where cameras seemed to have been pre-arranged to film initimate moments. They developed a data bank of these videos and began to extort money around a year ago. In one case, they decided to extort Rs 5 lakh from a girl by convincing Yadav to call her up. The victim initially paid up. But then they demanded Rs 10 lakh more, prompting her to approach the cyber cell,” an official involved in the investigation said.That was last November. Cops said they had traced several calls and WhatsApp messages between Yadav and the complainant in the last three months. “We arrested him and, after questioning him and investigating the matter further, we arrested the two others who turned out to be the main accused,” an officer said.Cops said they were looking into the financial transactions involving the two young men. “There are many victims. We will investigate each complaint,” said an officer.