Rape convict on the run held, Delhi Police says he was planning to write book on his ‘victims’
Source:-theprint
New Delhi: For over a year, serial sex offender Dhaval Trivedi, 50, had been on the run. Convicted of raping and kidnapping eight women, including minors, Trivedi was planning to write a book on his victims, according to the Delhi Police.
‘Ten perfect women in my life’ was the title he had planned for his book, the police said.
The Delhi Police’s Crime Branch arrested the man from Solan in Himachal Pradesh.
His arrest brings to an end a search operation that the CBI led and one that spanned the states of Gujarat, Odisha, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Himachal.
A court in Rajkot, Gujarat, had convicted and sentenced Trivedi to life imprisonment in a 2012 case, in which he had been accused of raping two 16-year-olds over two years.
But in 2018, he jumped parole and allegedly sexually assaulted another minor, following which the CBI was roped in and a reward of Rs 5 lakh was announced for anyone giving any information about him.
The CBI had carried out raids in Gujarat, Odisha, Punjab and Uttarakhand to nab him but he proved elusive before the Delhi Police finally tracked him down to Himachal Pradesh Sunday.
Was working as a security guard’
According to Delhi Police officers, they received a communication from the CBI’s Mumbai branch regarding Trivedi, stating that the accused was in the “profession of teaching and habitual of luring and sexually exploiting minor girls during tuitions”.
The police then began collecting information on him and after tracing his movements, contacts and technical surveillance, found that he was at the Industrial Town of Baddi in Himachal’s Solan district.
“A team was then constituted and it zeroed in on a location in Baddi. A raid was conducted with the help of technical surveillance and source information,” Monika Bhardwaj, DCP (Crime), said.
A serial offender
Police said Trivedi posed as a teacher to commit his crimes.
“Dhaval Trivedi posed as a teacher and gave tuitions, during which he assaulted minors,” a senior Delhi Police officer said.
According to the police, Trivedi was first arrested for sexually assaulting two minors for which he was convicted for life.
In August 2018, he jumped parole and reportedly eloped with a teen girl, who returned home in June 2020 with an eleven-month-old child.
The girl had told the police that Trivedi was hiding in Ludhiana and had used forged identity cards to stay in Uttarakhand and Punjab.
MA in English, knew eight languages’
Trivedi was born in Thane, Maharashtra, in 1970 and completed his Masters in English from Gujarat University, Ahmedabad.
His father was a philosophy professor in Vadodara.
According to the police, he is “highly intelligent, knows eight languages and also worked as Principal and teacher in schools”.
He used pseudonyms and changed his appearances to conceal his identity, the police claimed.
“During his absconding period, he used to stay in gurdwaras as a Sikh and at waiting halls of railway stations to avoid being tracked by law agencies,” Bhardwaj said.
According to the police, Trivedi got married in 1996 but his wife died after a few months. He remarried in 1998, and had one daughter from his second wife.
The chargesheet filed by the CID in an earlier case said Trivedi was a “serial offender”.
While out on parole in the 2012 case, the police said, Trivedi again committed a similar offence in Chotila, Gujarat. The investigation of this case was transferred to the CBI by the order of the Gujarat High Court, following which the agency filed a case on 1 May 2019.