A gangrape drama that went horribly wrong in Jaipur

Jaipur: It was nearly 6 am on Tuesday when an operator at Jaipur police control room received a call.

The call was from a girl who was crying hysterically. What she told the operator was enough to put entire police force of the city on their toes within minutes.

The girl, later identified as Aarati Kumari, a resident of Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh, said she hired an auto from Jaipur railway station to reach her rented home in Jagatpura. As soon as the auto left the railway station premises, three men got into it. They took her to an isolated place and gangraped her. The auto driver also joined the three rapists in violating her, the girl alleged.

The narration had all elements of a horrifying crime: A young girl becoming a victim of a random kidnap; an auto driver being an accomplice in a violent gangrape and an MMS of the victim being shot by the culprits while they were raping her.

The incident created an outrage in the city with woman organizations, student groups and opposition parties accusing the government of not doing enough to ensure security for women.

The police left no stone unturned to catch the rapists, but the story took a strange turn when they examined the call details of the girl’s mobile phone and found inconsistencies in her statements.

The police discovered the girl and her boyfriend Rishiraj had cooked up the gangrape story to extort Rs 5 lakh from a friend.

After arriving in Jaipur on Monday night from Alwar, the girl called a friend of Rishiraj, identified as Sandeep, to her flat where the duo made consensual relationship.

In the wee hours, Aarati took away Sandeep’s ATM card and asked him to tell her its PIN. When he refused, she threatened to implicate him in a bogus rape case.

“After coercing the PIN out of Sandeep, she made him leave the flat and called up Rishiraj. The boyfriend dabbed some drops of pesticide on Aarati’s face in order to suggest that rapists had made her drink it,” said a senior police officer.

The girl then called up Sandeep and asked her to pay Rs 5 lakh. She threatened that she would lodge an FIR against him if he didn’t oblige. When Sandeep refused, Rishiraj drove her to Malviya Nagar and dropped her there. She called up the police control room with the story of gangrape from there. The police found a pesticide bottle from Aarati flat.

Aarati and Rishiraj planned to lodge a case of gangrape against Sandeep and then make her pay the money to withdraw the case.

During interrogation, it came up that the girl wanted to get rich quickly and Rishiraj took advantage of this. Rishiraj called her to Jaipur nearly three months ago and tried to push her into prostitution. When unknown people started coming to her ranted home, the landlord forced the girl to vacate the place. She then rented a flat in Jagatpura.

The duo was planning to blackmail one more friend, Brijesh, but he somehow came to know about the girl’s true intentions and managed to avoid the trap.

The girl was preparing for competition examinations. The police arrested the duo and produced them in a court that sent them to judicial custody.

The police also discovered that the 22-year-old girl and Rishiraj had attempted to blackmail people with same modus-operandi in Agra and Mainpuri also.