NEW DELHI: An Iranian woman told the police on Monday that she had been sexually assaulted and robbed by an auto driver near Lajpat Nagar, sending the southeast district cops on a frenzied, all-night hunt for the culprit.

The recovery of the woman’s bag from a mall early Tuesday morning brought the drama to a tame end. The ‘victim’ confessed she had cooked up the story after losing her Gucci bag which contained her passport, money and other belongings. The reason: She thought police would not act swiftly if she did not present a ‘serious crime’.

The woman also feared her husband would be mad at her for losing the expensive bag and her passport. She allegedly tore her own clothes and got herself admitted to a hospital. The police received a call from the hospital on Monday night informing them of the “assault”.

She alleged that the auto driver took her to a hotel in Amar Colony where he sexually assaulted her and robbed her of the bag.

She even feigned losing consciousness and appeared to be in trauma, police said. The special staff and all other police personnel were put on the job to crack the case. A team began to record the victim's statement and fetch out clues. Cops led by DCP (southeast) Karunakaran first scanned the CCTV footages of the stretch - from Lajpat Nagar market to Moolchand and Amar Colony -but could not find any such auto. Neither could a woman be spotted anywhere.

The cops then camped at Vikram hotel, mentioned by the victim as the venue of the attack. They scanned its CCTV footage but that too led them nowhere. All SHOs and beat constables were put on alert. Around midnight, Karunakaran got a call from south district DCP B S Jaiswal telling him that a bag belonging to a woman from Iran had been recovered by the Vasant Kunj police station from a bathroom in DLF Promenade mall. It contained the woman's passport, money and valuables. The details matched, leading the cops to believe they had got a first lead in the case.

When the team gave the bag back to the woman, she calmed down. By then, even the south district police suspected the accused to be hiding in their area. They were in for a surprise when they scanned the mall's CCTV footage. It showed the woman there in the evening.

Police are contemplating taking legal action

Times View

It is shocking that a woman should use the pretext of sexual assault to get the police to look for a lost handbag, even if it did contain valuable items like her passport. As in the famous parable of the boy crying wolf, every such false case does serious damage to the thousand of genuine complaints filed by women in India each year. There might be a temptation for some to use this case to suggest that a very large proportion of complaints filed are actually false, but this must be recognised as the exception not the norm. In each case the police must take the complaint seriously. If investigations reveal it to be false, there would be grounds for action against the complainant, but that can only be determined after a proper investigation.