An IIT Kanpur graduate has been arrested by the Bengaluru police for allegedly stalking a young woman who was his junior at the institute.

Avnish Kumar, 24, a native of Agra who was working with the Maharashtra state electricity board in Mumbai was arrested for his online harassment of a woman employed with a top Indian e-commerce company. The young woman was a year junior to Avnish during an MTech program at IIT Kanpur three years ago.

The Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central division) Sandeep Patil said the youth had been arrested on the basis of a complaint filed by the young woman who is a resident of Bengaluru.

Police said that the arrested youth began harassing the woman on social media after she rejected his overtures. Police said the youth was

in love with the young woman and had proposed to her but she had rejected him.

After the rejection he began threatening her and posted vulgar comments on her Facebook and Twitter accounts, police said.

“He was harassing the victim on social media and through emails since 2012. They came in contact with each other at IIT-Kanpur while they were studying there. He harassed her with vulgar posts on her Facebook and Twitter accounts,” DCP Sandeep Patil said.

A month ago the victim approached the Vivekanagar police station in central Bengaluru and filed a complaint stating that Avnish had threatened to come to Bengaluru to kill her.

“We registered a case for threatening and for outraging the modesty of a woman under the Indian Penal Code and under clauses of the Information Technology Act against Avnish. We nabbed him in Bengaluru on Thursday,” a police officer said.

According to the police the accused initially did not have the phone number of his victim and his harassment was restricted to the social media.

Recently, however he managed to track down the young woman’s phone number and called her threatening murder if she refused to marry him when he visits Bengaluru.

After the young woman approached the police about the threat to her life, the police laid a trap for Avnish and asked the victim to invite her stalker to a meeting.

A police team picked up the engineer soon after he arrived for the meeting. He was produced before a court and was remanded to judicial custody.

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