A woman journalist confronted and handed over to the police a 40-year-old man who is said to have clandestinely clicked photographs of her and other women who were shopping on the busy Commercial Street on Saturday evening.
Following a complaint by the journalist who works with an English daily, the police arrested Manoj Roy, a native of Kolkata and a resident of Kamakshipalya here, and seized his mobile phone. He had worked at a sales and marketing firm in Chennai for six years before moving to Bengaluru six months ago, the police said.
The complainant said she snatched the phone from Roy after she caught him clicking her photos when she was shopping on Commercial Street around 4.45 pm. She explained the sequence of events in a post on Facebook.
“I was shopping on Commercial Street, with three of my friends walking ahead. I just looked up to see this man – approaching from the opposite direction – take my picture on his phone! The flash went off and he quickly lowered the phone, trying to walk away. It took me a second to blink and realise what happened before I ran after him, screaming at him to stop.
“His pace quickened and he nearly took to his heels, but I waylaid him at the corner next to Krishniah Chetty and snatched his phone. He had managed to lock it and pretended not to know the passcode. I began yelling at him to show me the picture gallery, asking how dare he click my photo. Hands trembling, he answered with a shaky voice, ‘Sister, I have not taken any photos. Why will I do such a thing?”
Grabs his phone
When she grabbed the phone and went through it, she found not only her photo which he had clicked moments earlier but also about 20-25 photos of ‘other random women’ he had snapped on the same street in the past few hours, the post mentioned.
When she began screaming, a crowd gathered and her friends also rushed to her. “I flagged down a passing traffic constable and explained the situation to him; he immediately informed his law-and-order counterparts and I accompanied him as he brought the pervert down to the Commercial Street police station,” she said. She later deleted the post. The police suspect that the man circulated the photos on Facebook and WhatsApp or even morphed them on various websites.
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