Five women who were accused of running a honey-trapping and blackmailing ring in Madhya Pradesh's Indore were remanded to judicial custody till October 14 by a local court on Tuesday. As per sources, the accused were presented before the court of judicial magistrate first class (JMFC), Manish Bhatt.
The Madhya Pradesh police have also recently found more than 4000 files from the laptops and the phones of the accused people who were arrested in the alleged honey trapping case. These files include many screenshots of chats, audio clips and video recordings of objectionable nature. The incident came to light after an Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) engineer had filed a complaint alleging that two women were blackmailing him by threatening to make some objectionable videos viral.
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The court proceedings Shweta Vijay Jain, the lawyer representing the ring said that the women accused were completely anonymous to each other. Lawyer Dharmendra Gurjar further purported that the entire case was 'cooked up' by the police and that his client was beaten up in custody to obtain a confession. He alleged that police harassed her mentally to an extent that she slit her wrists with a glass in the bathroom. Reportedly, Gurjar said that so far only one complainant had come forward -Indore Municipal Corporation city engineer Harbhajan Singh. "The police do not have any concrete evidence in the so-called honey-trap case. In fact, this case has become a headache for the police," he claimed.
The other accused, Aarti Dayal and Shweta Swapnil Jain, have also alleged torture in police custody.
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No accused was tortured However, Gurjar's allegations were dismissed saying that no accused was tortured physically during the period of police custody and all the accused were produced in the court after their medical examination.
As per reports, this incident came into light when Indore corporation engineer Harbhajan Singh alleged that he was being blackmailed to the tune of Rs 3 crore over objectionable video clips.
The Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up for probing the honey-trapping case received complaints claiming an allegedly ongoing human-trafficking racket as well. The father of one of the girls involved in the alleged honey-trapping case was at the forefront of informing this to the SIT
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