Honey trap perpetrator engaged in duping, extortion for over two decades

The woman held for 'honey-trapping' a BJP MP to extort money has been engaged in her sordid activities of entrapment and blackmail for more than two decades now with her first case surfacing in 1993 when she extracted Rs 70,000 from a Uttar Pradesh Police constable, a police officer said on Friday.

"She is a native of a village in Muzaffarnagar (Uttar Pradesh) where it was found, when we contacted our state counterparts, that she had first levelled rape charges against a police constable named Subhash and took Rs 70,000 from him to quash her complaint," a Delhi Police officer told IANS.

"This was her first attempt 24 years ago. She has been extorting as many as 25-30 people including many politicians and businessman till April 2017 with the same modus operandi. She has obtained allegedly over Rs 12 crore from her victims -- all identified by police," the officer said.

According to the officer, she, posing as a senior Supreme Court lawyer, used to contact Members of Parliament after getting their numbers from parliament's official site. After a casual meeting, she invited them to lunch at her residence in Indirapuram (in Ghaziabad), lured them into a secret room and later captured their intimate moments by hidden cameras.

"She later blackmailed them, threatening to destroy their political career and family life by uploading an MMS clip on porn sites and thus extorted crores for not making it in public. Police teams recovered many DVDs of MMS of some politicians and businessmen from her laptop at her house," he said.

Noting that the court has given Delhi Police five days custody to collect evidence against her, he said that police have collected adequate proof against her to prove criminal charges. "She will be produced before the court on Monday after her police custody ends," the officer said, adding that her father and younger brother were also called for questioning and asked if they know of what she did.

Police have found, on examination of her call details, that her gang comprised over a half a dozen others including two women. All these are still at large but police teams are raiding their residences and hideouts in Uttar Pradesh, he said.

With some of her targets not coming forward, the woman was interrogated to ascertain identities of her victims over the last 24 years, the officer added.

The woman had in 2014 extorted money from an Uttrakhand MP and in 2016, from senior politician Shadi Lal Batra after accusing them of rape and molestation. But when police started investigating, she denied her charges and backed off to avoid legal action, the officer said.

In some other cases, it was found that she levelled charges against some politicians after they refused to accept her extortion demands to the tune of crores, the officer said.

The woman was arrested on Tuesday, a day after Bharatiya Janata Party MP K.C. Patel filed a complaint with Delhi Police against her.

(Sanjeev Pal can be reached at sanjeev.p@ians.in)

--IANS

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