Namita Bajpai By

Express News Service

LUCKNOW: The Special Investigation Team (SIT), probing the extortion case against rape case complainant, has claimed that the digital evidence, mobile data and related documents prima facie indicate the connivance of the law student and her friends in Rs 5 crore extortion bid from Swami Chinmayanand.

While talking to media persons, SIT chief IG Naveen Arora on Wednesday claimed that the girl was arrested only after the SIT got convinced of her involvement in the extortion case following her thorough interrogation with all the incriminating evidence at her house in the morning.

“The rape case complainant was arrested only after she acknowledged all the evidence and accepted her presence in the video clip which had gone viral on social media where she could be seen discussing the extortion bid with her friends in a moving car,” said I-G Arora.

“After collecting all the evidence and getting the girl’s admissions related to the evidence, we were convinced of her involvement in the extortion case and so we arrested her (case crime no 442/19 ) under Sections 385 (Putting person in fear of injury in order to commit extortion), 507 (Criminal intimidation by an anonymous communication), 201(Causing disappearance of evidence), 34 (Acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of IPC and Section 67 (A) of IT Act on Wednesday morning,” said the SIT chief. He added that the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate had ordered a 14-day judicial remand till October 7 for her.

IG Naveen Arora said that that though his team was still sequencing the events, the evidence prima facie indicated that initially the girl and her friends, made an extortion call to Swami Chinmayanand who got an FIR registered against unidentified persons.

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Elaborating on alleged modus operandi of the girl and her friends, the SIT chief said after making the initial extortion call, the girl and her friends – Sanjay, Sachin, Vikram, Sonu and Durgesh (all in jail now) –left Shahjahanpur and went to Delhi. “In between, the girl made the video of Chinmayanand viral on her facebook wall,” said the IT chief.

He claimed that in the meantime Shahjahanpur police tried to trace the fake ID from which the call was made to Chinmayanand. As police detained certain persons for grilling, the accomplices of the girl panicked and they sent a WhatsApp text message to Swami Chinmayanand asking for money while threatening him with tarnishing his image. “All these dots are getting connected automatically

leading towards the establishment of connivance of all these persons for extortion,” said SIT chief.

He also claimed the SIT had traced different locations of the girl and her friends all along with the extortion bid. “While the car driver Anoop, when confronted with the evidence, accepted to have shot the video of the rape case complainant and her friends discussing extortion in the car, the girl said that she did not know that the driver was shooting the video secretly,” said IG Arora. He added

that the SIT had corroborative evidence which showed that the girl was continuously changing the locations.

“It has come to fore through the evidence that all these men along with the girl first went to Delhi, then to Solan in Himachal Pradesh. They then returned to Delhi and went to Dausa, Rajasthan. The location of all of them was traced and it is confirmed that they all were together,” said the SIT chief.