Peepli Live co-director convicted of raping an American woman

NEW DELHI: A Delhi court convicted on Saturday Mahmood Farooqui, the co-director of popular Bollywood movie Peepli Live, of raping an American woman when she was

NEW DELHI: A Delhi court convicted on Saturday Mahmood Farooqui, the co-director of popular Bollywood movie Peepli Live, of raping an American woman when she was in India for research in 2015.

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The sentence will be decided on August 2.

The 35-year-old woman, a student at Columbia University in New York, had told the police that she was raped by the filmmaker at his Sukhdev Vihar house in southern Delhi on March 28 last year.

She alleged Farooqui raped her when she had gone to meet him to get help for her research work. She claimed to have met Farooqui in Varanasi where she had gone to collect information.

Last September, a senior police officer told HT that the woman returned to the US soon after the rape and wrote an email to Farooqui who apologised for “misbehaving” with her.

The woman later approached Delhi Police through diplomatic channels. She then returned to India and lodged a formal complaint on June 19.

“The woman alleged that Farooqui got drunk at a party and took her to a separate room where he forced himself on her,” the officer said.