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BENGALURU: A 28-year-old senior software engineer with a private firm has been arrested for allegedly raping his colleague , videographing the act and uploading the video on a porn website after she stopped yielding to his blackmailing threats.

Arindam Nath from West Bengal is a resident of Ejipura near Viveknagar. Arrested on Friday, he’s been remanded in judicial custody.

Viveknagar police said Arindam was arrested on the basis of a complaint lodged by a 26-year-old woman who works with him as an HR executive at a private digital transformation and digital marketing company in southeast Bengaluru.

The accused allegedly invited the woman to his Ejipura flat last year and raped her. He secretly recorded the act on his cellphone, showed the video to her and began blackmailing her. He threatened to upload it on porn websites if she didn’t visit his flat whenever he wanted. The woman gave in and was raped several times, she said in the complaint. Later, he began demanding money from her.

“I stopped acceding to his demands when he uploaded the video on a porn website on September 4,” the woman said in the complaint. Police said the woman is from Odisha and has been living in Bengaluru since 2015, adding that Arindam first professed his love to her and she trusted him only to be sexually abused and blackmailed by him.

A case was registered against Arindam on September 6. He confessed to have uploaded the rape video on a porn website, said police. Arindam has been booked under section 376 (punishment for rape), 384 (punishment for extortion) and 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) of IPC, and section 66E (punishment for violation of privacy) and other relevant sections of the Information Technology Act.

Video deleted by cybercrime police

The woman first approached cybercrime police, who deleted the video from the website and then referred her to the jurisdictional police station.

Survivor attempted suicide

The woman has undergone severe trauma, police said. She attempted to commit suicide by hanging herself from the ceiling of her north Bengaluru residence in the wee hours of September 6. Luckily, her roommate managed to save her in the nick of time. The roommate convinced the survivor to seek police help. The same day, the woman and her friends approached police with the complaint.

