A man who allegedly recorded a video of a woman being raped on a footpath in the busy Koyla Phatak area of Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain has been arrested, the police said on Saturday.
The woman was raped on Wednesday and she filed a complaint on Thursday. The police had said passersby recorded videos of the crime without intervening to stop the perpetrator.
On Saturday, Pradeep Sharma, Ujjain’s superintendent of police, said the district police, cyber and social media teams were deployed to identify who made the video of the crime and circulated it.
Sharma said the accused was identified as 42-year-old Mohammad Salim, who is an autorickshaw driver.
He has been booked under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to disclosing the identity of victim of certain offences (72), watching or capturing the image of a woman engaging in a private act (77) and selling obscene content (297). He has also been booked under the Information Technology Act section 67, which deals with publishing or transmitting obscene material, and Section 4 of the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, which pertains to prohibits the publication of any material that contains an indecent representation of women.
The police said they were examining Salim’s phone and interrogating him.
The woman had accused a man named Lokesh of raping her.
Lokesh was arrested within two hours of the woman’s complaint, the police had said. “[He] was brought to the police station and questioned, during which Lokesh admitted to committing the crime,” said a police official.
The accused was subsequently presented before a court that remanded him to judicial custody. Om Prakash Mishra, Ujjain’s city superintendent of police, had earlier said that a video of the crime was taken as evidence in the case.