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Dubai salesman jailed for life for raping woman,
recording her in the nude
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Culprit held a knife to victim’s throat and threatened to make a video clip public
Published: January 20, 2021 10:18
Ali Al Shouk, Senior Reporter, Gulf News
Dubai: A Dubai salesman from India was sentenced to life by the Dubai Court of First Instance for raping a housewife inside her home and threatening her with a knife. He also stole Dh200 from her while being under the influence of alcohol.
The court heard that
a 39-year-old Indian woman went to drop her son to the school bus pick-up point outside her building in the Naif area of Dubai in February 2020. When she returned to her apartment, the defendant approached her from behind, put a knife to her throat and asked to me enter the apartment.
“After I dropped my son, someone put a knife on my throat and asked me to enter the apartment. I yelled but nobody heard me. I resisted and kicked him, but he pushed me into the bedroom,” the victim said on record. The 23-year-old Indian defendant forced the woman to take off her clothes and recorded her naked using his mobile phone, before raping her.
“He stole Dh200 and threatened to publish the video clip if I alerted the police. He told me that he was monitoring me every time I stepped out to visit the supermarket in the neighbourhood.”
The woman then informed her husband, who alerted the Naif Police Station.
A 34-year-old Emirati policeman testified that a team of officers identified the salesman after two days of investigation. “He admitted to the crime and we found Dh135 in his possession. He claimed that it was part of the money he had stolen from the victim,” said the Emirati police officer on record.
During interrogation, the defendant confessed to raping the woman under the influence of alcohol.
Dubai Public Prosecution has charged the defendant with rape, robbery and illegally consuming alcohol.
The verdict is subject to appeal within 15 days.
India's Dark Netted Child Trap
An Interpol tip on dark net child porn leads the CBI to a state government employee who abused at least 70 children in 12 years
By Bhavna Vij-Aurora
February 01, 2021
Since it is only Jan 22nd, 2021, we may have to wait 10 days to read this!
Digital Imaging Photos: Tribhuvan Tiwari, Shutterstock
By all outward appearances, Rambhawan, 41, was given to leading a regimented, disciplined life. So much so that if you knew his daily schedule, you could set your watch twice a day according to his routine—at 8 am, when he left for office, and then at 2 pm, when he returned for lunch.
The quiet man—a junior engineer with the Uttar Pradesh government’s irrigation department in Chitrakoot—was like any other middle-class man who went about his life earning a living and leading an ordinary life with his wife. The only visible sign of a not-so-ordinary life was his government car—a definite leverage in a small town where a ‘sarkaari naukri’ is a sign of power indicating that the man is not to be messed with. This is how his dark secret remained well-hidden for over 12 years. On November 16, 2020, Rambhawan was arrested by the CBI and accused of sexually abusing at least 70 children in the past 12 years—mostly boys aged between five and 16 years—recording the paedophilic acts and selling the child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the secretive, worldwide dark web.
The victims are spread across three districts of UP—Banda, Chitrakoot and Hamirpur. The ongoing investigations have unravelled perhaps the biggest reported child sex abuse racket in the country with national and international ramifications.
A relatively new department of the CBI—the Online Child Sex Abuse Exploitation (OCSAE) Prevention and Investigation Unit—received the first information in September regarding the abuse of children from Interpol, which trawls the dark web and keeps an eye on criminal activities there. “We received a short clip that showed an Indian-looking man sexually abusing a child. When we started our investigations, we found several such videos and photographs on sites that have CSAM. Many of them are paywalled. They had been shared on various global sites—Russian, European and American. His face was not even clearly visible,” reveals a CBI officer.
Some of Rambhawan’s earliest victims have turned into abusers themselves, investigators found to their shock.
The investigators did not have much to go on. It took them a month to decipher the embedded geo-location on the videos. “The IP address led us to Karwi in Chitrakoot, where we arrested Rambhawan,” the officer adds. A search at Rambhawan’s home led to the recovery of several gadgets—10 mobile phones, two high-end laptops, a digital video recorder, a web-camera, six pen drives, memory cards and a variety of sex toys in addition to over Rs 8.5 lakh in unaccounted cash. He also had PS4, a popular gaming console, at his home where he allowed the older children to play games like PUBG.
Rambhawan allegedly used smartphones and gadgets to lure the children into his house. He never stayed in any government accommodation, something he was entitled to, and preferred to stay in lower middle-class colonies where he could find easy targets. Many empty mobile phone boxes were also recovered from his home, leading the investigators to believe that he had gifted some of the phones to his victims. His wife Durgawati was also subsequently arrested for conspiracy and for threatening the victims.
Most of the abused children were from poor socio-economic strata. Their silence was bought by money—Rs 200 to Rs 400 each time. His victims were mostly from his neighbourhood and from construction sites where he was supervising work as a junior engineer, besides children of his relatives, domestic help, milkman and tailor. “He doesn’t seem to have spared any child who came near him. He also had the habit of clicking pictures of random children he came across, paying them to take off their pants,” says an investigator.
ILLUSTRATION BY SAAHIL
Some of Rambhawan’s earliest victims have also turned into abusers themselves, investigators found to their shock. “One of his first victims, now 22 years old, has also abused children. There could be a few others too,” says a CBI officer. Investigators stumbled upon this while going through electronic evidence recovered from Rambhawan’s house. “There are more than 24,000 emails that show Rambhawan was sharing CSAM with other paedophiles all over the country and globally. He also used to receive such material. That’s how we found that one of the victims was also sharing child abuse videos and pictures. It seems the accused has managed to create a vast network and it requires painstaking investigation at many different levels,” the officer says, hinting that more arrests will happen as the investigations proceed.
Investigators believe that a few other victims too have turned abusers, most probably the ones he gifted smartphones. “A large number of mobile phones and laptops were synchronised for sharing of the material. Whenever one user uploaded something, it was automatically shared with all,” the officer adds. The CBI officers claim that they have not come across anything like this before. To understand the psyche of Rambhawan better and to ensure he does not carry any sexually transmitted disease, and also for medico-forensic examination of the children, the CBI contacted the All Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi.
The Abuser and the Abused:
