A police sub-inspector has been booked in Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj for allegedly raping a 35-year-old Dalit woman who had approached him regarding threat calls from an anonymous caller.
The accused, Sudhir Pandey, has been suspended and a probe has been ordered against him, Indian Express reported.
According to the police report, the alleged incident occurred on Thursday, September 21st, when Pandey purportedly coerced the woman into joining him in his car to help identify the individual responsible for making threatening calls to her.
The married woman, who has a son, stated in her complaint that she had visited a police outpost to report receiving threatening calls from an unknown caller. The officer in charge at the outpost, S-I Pandey, took her cellphone number and assured her that he would investigate the caller’s identity. However, as per the woman’s account, Pandey began making unsolicited calls to her.
In the afternoon of September 21st, the woman stated that S-I Pandey asked her to come to the police outpost later in the evening.
“The woman said that when she was heading towards the police outpost, she came across S-I Pandey, who was seated inside a private car. The S-I told her that he has traced a person who had made the threatening call to her. She alleged that the S-I forced her to sit inside the car and offered her cold drinks laced with sedatives on the way. The woman said that after consuming cold drinks, she fell unconscious and the S-I then raped her inside the car,” a police officer involved in the probe, said to Indian Express.
The woman also mentioned that when they were driving back to the outpost, Pandey, who had been drinking and was drunk, couldn’t steer properly, and their car crashed into a tree. She got hurt, and a group of police officers took her to the hospital.
She also claimed that three men, named Arjun, Sabhajeet, and Santosh Pandey, along with the officer in charge, started intimidating her, telling her not to report a rape complaint.
The FIR was registered on September 26 after the woman lodged a complaint with senior officers. The FIR against S-I Pandey has been lodged under IPC sections 328 (causing hurt by means of poison, etc., with intent to commit an offence), 354-D (stalking), 376 (rape), 506 (criminal intimidation) and different sections of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
