CHENNAI: Police on Tuesday arrested a software engineer for filming his friend’s wife using a pen camera fixed to their bathroom window at Pallikaranai in Chennai.

A court later remanded 26-year-old Annamalai, whose ‘selfie’ was captured in the camera, in judicial custody.

Police said the complainant Vishal’s wife had noticed a strange gadget on her bathroom window while taking bath and informed her husband who found a pen taped to the window.

Vishal, himself a software engineer with a Velachery firm, discovered that the pen had a camera which had recorded his wife’s images. He also found a ‘selfie’ of Annamalai, who lived on the first floor of the same apartment complex with his family.

When Vishal confronted Annamalai with the pen, the man denied it was his. Vishal lodged a complaint with the Pallikaranai police.

A case was registered and inspector K Natarajan summoned Annamalai, a technical head with a leading software firm in Pallikaranai, who initially refuted charges of fixing the pen camera. But after being shown his picture, Annamalai admitted to the offence.

Annamalai told the police that he had free access to Vishal’s house on the ground floor as both had been living in the complex for more than four years and even had gone for picnics with their families.

He bought the pen camera from a shop in Ritchie Street for Rs 8,000 and took a ‘selfie’ with it as part of the demonstration.

Police said they were not sure when Annamalai had fixed the camera to the window and whether he had already retrieved some of the images captured on it. “We will inquire about this too,” an investigation officer said.

Annamalai was booked under sections 4 (1) of the Tamil Nadu Women Harassment (Prevention) Act, 66-E (intentionally capturing the image of a private area of any person without her consent) of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and IPC 511 (attempting to commit offences punishable with imprisonment for life).

