A 14-year-old Sri Lankan girl, raped by a man who lured her to India with the promise of a career in films and modelling, has been rescued and sent back to her home country.
The teen and her mother flew to Sri Lanka from the Kempegowda International Airport on Friday evening after completing the legal formalities. The teen's alleged tormentor, 34-year-old Sathish Patil, has been arrested.
The girl's story is nothing short of a nightmare.
In 2015, she became friends with Patil who claimed to a "fixer" in Bollywood. He claimed his relatives were into a popular Hindi television serial. His Facebook profile showed him posing alongside film stars. This was enough for the teen to get convinced that she could also pursue a career in films with his help. Patil encouraged her. Looking at her photographs on Facebook, he said she could easily get into films and asked her to come to Mumbai with some money.
The girl and her mother arrived in Mumbai on November 28, 2017. Patil met them on December 1 and took them to a hotel in Andheri. The same day, he called the girl to his room but kept the mother in a separate place, asking her not to disturb them as the "casting" was under way. In the room, he gave the girl some juice laced with sedatives, and she fell unconscious. When she woke up a few hours later, she had severe pain in the lower abdomen. But she didn't talk to her mother about the incident.
Patil later took the mother and the daughter to Haveri to buy them clothes, saying the money (Rs 2 lakh) they had brought was not enough to purchase fashionable outfits in Mumbai. He then brought them to Bengaluru. On December 7, he put them on a Mumbai-bound bus at Majestic and deserted them. When he didn't turn up, the teen opened up to her mother, and the two went to the jurisdictional Upparpet police station and filed a complaint.
Police immediately opened a case under various sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act, IPC section 376 (2) (rape of a minor) and cheating. They also managed to arrest the suspect. A court later remanded him in judicial custody.
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