UP rape victim sent to 14-day judicial custody

In a dramatic turn of events, the law student, who has accused former union minister and senior BJP leader Swami Chinmayanand of raping her, was on Wednesday arrested on charges of allegedly trying to extort money from the seer a day after her pre-arrest bail petition was admitted by a district court in Shahjahanpur, about 175 kilometres from here.

The victim was remanded to 14-day judicial custody by a local court.

While the lawyers of the victim claimed that the special investigation team (SIT), which was probing the matter, had assured the court on Tuesday that she would not be arrested until the court pronounced its verdict on the application, the prosecution lawyers said that no interim protection had been granted to the victim by the court.

The family members of the victim alleged that the SIT sleuths raided their residence on Wednesday morning and virtually ''dragged'' her to the waiting vehicle.

Crying foul, the family members said that the arrest, a day before the hearing on her pre-bail arrest application, proved that the SIT wanted to pressurise the victim to withdraw her complaint against Chinmayanand.

According to the sources in Shahjahanpur, the SIT had tried to arrest the victim on Tuesday also but could not do so owing to the presence of her lawyers and admission of her application seeking pre-arrest bail by the court.

The SIT, which had earlier said that it wanted to question the victim, did not seek her remand in the court on Wednesday.

The name of the victim was included in the FIR registered against three of her friends on the basis of a complaint by Chinmayanand accusing them of trying to black mail him by threatening to make his (seer) ''sex videos'' public. The three ''friends'' of the victim were already in police custody.

Chinmayanand was arrested by the SIT a few days back for ''sexually exploiting'' the victim, who was a student of law at a college of which the seer was the director. The SIT claimed that it was in possession of a video purportedly containing conversation between the victim and her friends about the plan to extort money from the seer.