Man tries to fund nirvana trip by blackmailing woman

NEW DELHI: Akash Pathak is 41, single and aim to become a spiritual guru. He wants to spend his life in the Himalayas in search of the divine knowledge and meditate.

NEW DELHI: Akash Pathak is 41, single and aim to become a spiritual guru. He wants to spend his life in the Himalayas in search of the divine knowledge and meditate. He needs money to fund his journey and stay.

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Rajeev Gupta is 34, married, and a businessman. He owes banks, friends and finding it difficult to stay afloat. He needs money to pay off his loans and revive his restaurant business.

Pathak and Gupta, who are close friends, chose the unholiest ways of funding their needs -extorting money from a woman by blackmailing her with intimate photos. Both are cooling their heels behind the bars.

Both were arrested on Monday for blackmailing the wife of a business partner of Gupta. Police said the duo were demanding R10 lakh from the 37-year-old woman. They threatened her that, if she wouldn’t pay up, they would upload her intimate, morphed photos and videos along with her personal details on social networking and porn websites, police said.

Rishi Pal, deputy commissioner of police (east), said they asked the woman to agree to the blackmailer’s demand to trap him. Pathak asked the woman to come to Anand Vihar Terminus with Rs 10 lakh. A police team nabbed him there. He led us to Rajeev Gupta, who made the plan.

“Pathak’s arrest led us Rajeev Gupta, who was the brain behind the plan,” DCP Pal said.

Pal said Gupta did not tell Pathak that the woman was known to him. The victim was the wife of Gupta’s former business partner.

Gupta told police that he got the woman’s intimate photos and videos with her husband from a laptop that his business partner had given him for a while.

“Gupta saved the videos and photos in a pen drive,” said a police officer.

In dire need of money, he planned to blackmail his former partner’s wife and roped Pathak in his plan. Gupta kept himself under cover as he was known to the woman.

As per the plan, Pathak first filed a complaint with the police that his phone has been lost. He then used the same phone to call up the victim, the officer said.

“Two pen drives, containing the intimate photos and videos have been seized,” the officer said. woman filed a complaint at the Anand Vihar police station on October 8. She told the police that an unknown man was blackmailing her over phone for the past one month.

She said the blackmailer had sent her some of her intimate photos and video clips on WhatsApp to make her believe that he was not bluffing. Instead of telling her husband about the case, the woman approached the police and filed a complaint.