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PUNE: The Wanowrie police have booked a 30-year-old man from New Delhi on the charge of stalking a woman since June 2018 after she rejected his marriage proposal.

The woman from Himachal Pradesh, currently living in Hadapsar with her husband and preparing for a competitive examination, had met the man on a social networking site and started communicating with him.

Police said the woman had visited her parents in Himachal Pradesh, from where she travelled to New Delhi on a bus. She later contacted the man on phone, met him and stayed at his house for a day after missing the bus to Himachal Pradesh. Relations between them soured after she rejected his proposal on the ground that she was married. “The man then started stalking and threatening her,” a police officer said.

The woman, in her FIR, accused the man of stealing data from her cellphone when she had met him.

He was also accused of hacking her email address, sending lewd messages from it to her acquaintances, creating a fake social media profile in her husband’s name and sharing her photographs.

On the delay in lodging the FIR, inspector Salim Chaus (crime) of the Wanowrie police said, “Her family members had counselled the man, following which he wrote an apology and vowed to not commit such an offence again. But he again started stalking and threatening the woman.”

(The victim's identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme Court directives on cases related to sexual assault)

