Indore police file chargesheet in MP ‘honey trap case’

Source – indianexpress.com

Indore police on Monday filed the chargesheet in the alleged Madhya Pradesh ‘honey strap case’, naming eight people, including two who are at large.

Meanwhile, Indore police have booked Jeetu Soni, businessman and editor of the newspaper Sanjha Lokswami, on a rape complaint by a Mumbai-based woman. Soni’s newspaper had filed several reports on the honey trap case until late-November.

The police chargesheet comes nearly three months after the case came to light in which government officials were allegedly blackmailed and extorted by threatening them with sex clips allegedly involving them.

Harbhajan Singh, a now-suspended Indore Municipal Corporation superintending engineer, had approached the police alleging that he was being blackmailed for Rs 3 crore by some women, who had threatened to circulate clips showing him in a compromising position.

Five women were subsequently arrested from Indore and Bhopal on Sept 18 and 19. During raids on their premises, the police said, laptops and phones and Rs 14 lakh cash were seized. The gadgets contained hundreds of video and audio clips, the police said.

The electronic evidence has been sent to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Hyderabad on orders from the Madhya Pradesh High Court, which is monitoring the probe by a Special Investigation Team. The chargesheet was filed in the court of JMFC A K Gupta. The five women and their driver, Omprakash Kori, 45, have been charged under IPC Sections related to conspiracy, forgery, extortion, human trafficking and criminal intimidation, as well as Sections 66 (e), 67 and 67-A of Information Technology Act. All six are in judicial custody, while two others were named as absconders.

In the rape case against Soni, the Mumbai woman alleged that during her trip to Indore three years ago a bouncer took her to the restaurant-bar ‘My Home’, where Soni allegedly raped her. She also alleged that the bouncer made a video of the act.