A 23-year-old woman has accused the director of a private hostel in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal of raping her for six months, NDTV reported. A case was registered in Indore on Saturday on the basis of the woman’s complaint.
Ashwini Sharma, the director of a hostel for speech and hearing impaired girls, was arrested on Thursday after a 20-year-old woman who lived at the hostel filed a complaint the previous day, accusing him of rape, criminal intimidation and wrongful confinement. Two other girls then lodged a complaint accusing Sharma of molesting them. The alleged rape and sexual harassment took place between October and August 4, The Indian Express reported.
A Bhopal court on Monday sent Sharma to one-day police custody.
“I was kept in custody, made to watch porn films and was raped for six months,” the woman who filed a complaint on Saturday told the police in Indore. She alleged Sharma of assaulting her when she refused to give in to his demands. Sharma had allegedly confined the woman and three others in a house in Awadhpuri.
“I am in touch with the Indore police and asked them to register a case and forward the case diary to Bhopal police for further investigation,” said Dharmendra Choudhary, a senior police officer in Bhopal.
A Special Investigation Team visited the hostel on Sunday and recovered ATM cards and the complainants’ documents, ANI reported.
Meanwhile, the Congress on Sunday claimed that it has proof that the state government provided assistance to a boys’ hostel run by Sharma, reported the Hindustan Times. Congress state unit vice-president Bhupendra Gupta produced an official letter dated December 28, 2016, that Director of Social Justice Department Ajit Kumar wrote to the the department’s joint director, asking him to give Rs 1,800 per head every month to the Kripalu Boys hostel.
The letter mentions that the financial aid was being given under a special scheme for physically disabled students studying in Industrial Training Institutes and was for the year 2016-’17.
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