HIGHLIGHTS
- SIT probing the sexual assault case against Chinmayanand named two senior party leaders in the extortion case
- With this, the number of those accused of trying to extort money from Chinmayanand has gone up to six
SHAHJAHANPUR: Internal feud in Shahjahanpur BJP came to the fore on Tuesday when SIT probing the sexual assault case against former Union minister Chinmayanand named two senior party leaders, including DPS Rathore, the younger brother of JPS Rathore, who is the vice-president of the party’s state unit, in the extortion case. The other BJP leader named in the chargesheet, to be filed in a court in Shahjahanpur on Wednesday, is Ajit Singh, a local heavyweight.
Initially, the extortion case was filed against unidentified but during investigation SIT had charged the law student and her three friends in this case. The SIT will also file a chargesheet in the sexual assault case against Chinmayanand on Wednesday with no fresh charges against the former Union minister.
“The probe into the case has been completed and chargesheet will be filed in the court tomorrow (on Wednesday). The pen drive which was snatched from the law student in Dausa (Rajasthan), has been recovered from BJP leaders, DPS Rathore and Ajit Singh,” IG-rank officer Naveen Arora, heading the SIT, said.
“These leaders had snatched the pen drive from the law student in Dausa, Rajasthan, and had viewed the contents on their laptop. They had later deleted the pictures and demanded Rs 1.25 crore from Chinmayanand to help ensure disposal of the matter. Both have been found guilty on this count,” Arora said.
With this, the number of those accused of trying to extort money from Chinmayanand has gone up to six. The other four accused are the law student, who had charged Chinmayanand with sexual harassment, Sanjay, Vikram and Sachin. All of them are in jail.
“A case diary of 4,700 pages along with two chargesheets of 20 pages will be submitted in the court now. We have verified all the evidences scientifically, voice of all the accused in the videos was also verified through voice sampling,” Arora said.
Arora said that it was found during investigation that the law student used to lock her room in the hostel, though she claimed that in her absence some vital evidence were removed by the college administration. This charge of the law student has not been found true in the investigations as Sanjay had put all important things in a box and a trolley bag kept it at the house of his relative named Rahul on August 10. Before leaving for Delhi, he took some of the items with the consent of law student from the articles and possibly they took the spectacle along, Arora said.
He said that when the probe and arrests started, the box was thrown in a drain and the SIT which retrieved it later did not find the spectacles with camera, the evidence which the law student had alleged had gone missing.
“The spectacles which the law student said she had used for making the video of Chinmayanand while giving him massage had been removed either by Sanjay or the victim herself,” Arora added.
The SIT was constituted by the UP government on the orders of the Supreme Court in September to investigate the charges levelled by the woman, who was then a postgraduate student at a college run by Chinmayanand’s trust.
Chinmayanand was arrested on September 21. Police had on August 27 booked him under sections 364 (kidnapping or abducting in order to murder) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code based on the father’s complaint.
He was later booked under section 376C of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which is usually applied in cases where a person abuses his position to “induce or seduce” a woman under his charge to have “sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape”.
The woman went missing on August 24, a day after she posted a video on social media alleging that a “senior leader of the sant community” was harassing and threatening to kill her.
Her father had filed a complaint with the police, accusing 72-year-old Chinmayanand of sexually harassing her, a charge refuted by the former Union minister’s lawyer who claimed it was a “conspiracy” to blackmail him.
