NE NEWS SERVICE
NAGPUR, OCT 5
A 22-year-old Nepalese woman travelled all the way from Lucknow to file a rape case here in Maharashtra against a man, police said on Monday.
Since the man warned her against approaching police in connection with the alleged offence that took place in the Uttar Pradesh capital, the woman fled from there and somehow managed to reach Nagpur, located over 800 km from Lucknow.
She came to a friend here who helped her in lodging a zero FIR, they said.
A zero First Information Report (FIR) can be filed in any police station and it can be later transferred to the appropriate police station having competent jurisdiction.
As per the woman’s complaint, she came to India from Nepal in 2018 for a job.
Since March this year, she was staying with a woman friend in the latter’s rented flat on Faizabad Road in Lucknow, senior police inspector Wazeer Sheikh, from Nagpur’s Koradi police station, said.
The friend introduced the victim to the accused, Pravin Rajpal Yadav, a Lucknow native who worked as a software engineer in Dubai, on a video call.
According to the victim, she had kept Rs 1.5 lakh with her friend and when she asked for it, the latter did not return the money and started beating and harassing her.
The victim complained about this to Yadav, who then booked a room for the victim at a hotel in Lucknow and asked her to shift there, the official said.
After a couple of days, the accused also came to Lucknow from Dubai. He met the victim at the hotel, where he allegedly drugged her and raped her, the official said.
The accused also shot some objectionable photographs and videos of the victim. He also took her to a friend’s place in Lucknow where he allegedly again gave her drugs and raped her, the official said.
The accused later uploaded the victim’s photos on her social media accounts and threatened to make them viral if she did not listen to him or approached police, the official said.
The woman somehow managed to escape from Lucknow and came to a Nepalese friend in Nagpur on September 30.
They went to Koradi police station here and lodged a complaint against Yadav and the victim’s woman friend from Lucknow, the official said.
Based on the complaint, the police on Saturday lodged a zero FIR against the accused under Indian Penal Code Sections 376 (rape), 354 (molestation), 392 (robbery), 342 (wrongful confinement), 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating), he said.
The victim along with a police team, the case papers and a cover letter of the Nagpur DCP left for Lucknow on Sunday night for registration of the case with Chinhat police in Lucknow, the official said.
