Dombivli sexual assault case: WhatsApp group under police scanner

The survivor registered a case on Wednesday night wherein a total of 33 young men eventually came to be named as accused.

A WhatsApp group that the Dombivli gangrape survivor and some of the accused were part of has come under the scanner of the Manpada police after an obscene video of the survivor was allegedly posted on this group earlier this year, officials said.

The survivor, who stays with her family in Dombivli (East), was allegedly blackmailed and sexually assaulted by 33 accused from January to September this year. (Image for representation.)

The survivor registered a case on Wednesday night, wherein a total of 33 young men eventually came to be named as accused, alleging intimidation, blackmail and prolonged sexual abuse from January to September this year. The police have so far arrested 27 accused and also sent two more, who are minors, to the juvenile remand home in Bhiwandi.

According to people familiar with the matter, the survivor, in her statement, has said that one of the accused posted her obscene video on the group when she refused to meet him in May this year.

“Ever since they got access to the video recorded in January, in which the main accused was sexually assaulting the victim, the accused had repeatedly been calling the victim. They would ask her to come to various locations, where several of them would force themselves on her. On May 16, one of them called her up and made a similar demand. When she refused, he posted her video and the main accused on a WhatsApp group named ‘Friends’, of which the victim was also a member,” an officer with the Manpada police said.

The survivor has said in her statement that action had the desired effect and she agreed to meet the accused. Subsequently, he picked her up from near her residence on his motorbike and took her to Rabale in Navi Mumbai, where she was allegedly forced to drink alcohol and was sexually assaulted by seven of the accused. The survivor has said that after this instance, she became so unwell that she had to be admitted to the hospital and given a saline drip.

The police have obtained details of all the members of the WhatsApp group in question. They will be making inquiries with other members of the group as well as the group administrator to find out if any of them, other than the accused, knew the survivor’s plight, people cited above said.

The officer said that the survivor had refused to meet the accused on this particular occasion because earlier in the same month, they had forcibly restrained her for nearly an entire day, leading to her parents filing a Missing Person’s Complaint.

“The survivor was finding it increasingly difficult to come up with convincing lies to explain her frequent absences from home, and at the same time was terrified of the videos being made public if she did not bow down to the demands of the accused,” the officer said.