‘Sexter’ who harassed 1,500 women arrested

NEW DELHI: He randomly dialed mobile phone numbers. If a woman answered, he saved the number with a code name, checked her profile picture on WhatsApp, and sent sexually explicit videos, images and messages, just for kicks.

Mohammad Khalid, a 31-yearold jobless school dropout, was arrested on Tuesday for harassing more than 1,500 women by sending them porn videos, vulgar photos, incriminating text messages and vulgar jokes.

“He did that only to pretty women, not others. He used to check their WhatsApp profile pictures and if he found them attractive, he used to start chatting with them. He said it was harmless flirting and he did it for fun. It gave him a kick,” a police officer said.

The man from old Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar area has been at it since last August, amassing a collection of over 2,000 phone numbers of women from Delhi and other NCR areas, besides a stockpile of around 60GB of porn video clips and photos on his phones. The serial “sexter” used three prepaid SIM cards, which he had bought providing fake identities, to send the salacious content. “The man had been tormenting innocent women … His arrest will be big relief to them,” DCP (Northwest) Vijay Singh said.

The serial “sexter” used three prepaid SIM cards, which he had bought providing fake identities, to send the salacious content.

“The man had been tormenting innocent women … His arrest will be big relief to them. While some came forward to register a complaint, many of them just kept quiet, which encouraged him to target more women,” DCP (Northwest) Vijay Singh said.

He put a few women’s marriages on the brink “as their husbands started doubting them of having an affair with him”, the officer said.

Police launched a hunt when a woman approached them on May 30 with a complaint that a man was harassing her for a month and threatened to kill her after she warned him.

Using digital surveillance, stakeouts and stealth, the investigators located shops that sold the SIM cards and where he used to get his phones recharged for talk-time and data. “He was arrested from a mobile shop in Sadar Bazaar when he came to get another recharge,” Singh said.Police seized his mobile phones and SIM cards along with his pornographic stash.

“We recovered chats and text messages that he sent to over 1,500 women. When questioned, he said he randomly called a number and if he liked the woman’s voice, he used to save her number,” an officer said. If a woman warned him of police action, he allegedly threatened to morph their WhatsApp profile pictures with pornographic images and upload them online.