delhi

Updated: Jun 14, 2016 09:37 IST

Three days after a 25-year-old woman filed an FIR and accused two youths of allegedly abducting, drugging and gang-raping her in their moving Swift Dzire car, the police on Monday arrested the woman and her live-in partner on the charges of extorting money from the youths.

Police said all the charges the woman allegedly made against the two youths, who are pursuing their MBA courses from different universities in Australia and India, were false and premeditated with the intention to extort money from their families. The arrested live-in partner of the woman, identified as Kishan Kumar, is a resident of Jagatpuri in east Delhi.

Mandeep Singh Randhawa, DCP (southeast), said the arrested couple ran a gang that targeted innocent youths and extorts money from them after registering false gang rape cases against them.

Apart from the Saturday’s incident in which the woman had claimed that she was thrown out of the moving car after being gang-raped, the gang allegedly extorted Rs 5 lakh from three youths from east Delhi after implicating them in a similar crime in February this year.

In the latest case, a sting operation was done on the couple while they were accepting Rs 9.50 lakh as extortion money from the two youths. A sum of Rs 50,000 was already paid to them as token money on Sunday. Kishan used the token money to purchase an air-conditioner soon after they got the money, said police.

According to Randhawa, the arrests came following information that the complainant in the gang-rape case registered at the Sunlight Colony police station was frequently contacting the alleged suspects and striking a deal with their families in lieu of withdrawing the case.

“Since there were discrepancies in the woman’s statements, we got suspicious. Our teams did a background check on her and found that she had filed a similar case in February at the Anand Vihar police station.

“Further probe revealed that the woman had turned hostile when her statement was recorded under section 164 of CrPC in that case. We learnt that she had extorted Rs 10 lakh from the three youths for turning hostile,” said Randhawa.

The couple purchased a secondhand Hyundai i10 car and an I-phone 6 with the ill-gotten money. Once again, the couple went out on Friday night looking for another target, said a police officer.

“The couple was roaming in Hauz Khas area when they spotted the two youths in a Swift car outside a nightclub. They followed the youths till Mukarba Chowk during which they noted down their car registration number. The couple returned to ITO where Kishan dropped her near the Delhi Police headquarters and returned home.

“A few minutes later she called the police and alleged she was abducted, drugged and gang-raped by two men. She also provided the police the car registration number,” the officer said.