Students upload nude pics of woman, she kills herself
A woman in her midthirties committed suicide in West Bengal’s East Midnapore district last week after four individuals, including three high school students, allegedly uploaded nude photographs of her on the social media, police said on Monday.
Police said the woman, a resident of Chandipur in East Midnapore district, hanged herself at her home late on Saturday.
The accused were identified as 21-year-old Chandan Guchait, a 17-year-old and two boys aged 16.
They were arrested on Sunday on the basis of a suicide note found on her and remanded in judicial custody for two weeks.
“Cases have been registered under sections that deal with dishonouring any individual by posting obscene pictures on the social media... Their act provoked the woman to kill herself,” said superintendent of police (East Midnapore) V Solomon Nesakumar.
The victim had lost her mobile phone while taking her daughter to a dance school a couple of months ago. One of the accused, a Class 10 student, found the phone and returned it – but not before transferring a few “private” photographs of the woman to his mobile device, police said.
The woman’s brother alleged that the student later telephoned her and tried blackmailing her into a sexual relationship.
“They even wanted her to send more photographs of the kind. When she declined, the boy threatened to upload the pictures on social media,” he said. “They carried out their threat, and my sister decided that death was better than dishonour.”
The accused are students of three different schools in the district but live in the same neighbourhood. Police said they found photographs of the woman as well as of a few other girls on their cellphones. “We will produce documents in court to prove that three of my clients are yet to attain the age of eighteen,” said Sharif Nawaz, their lawyer.
While the woman’s husband worked in Odisha, she lived in Chandipur with their three children and in-laws.
Earlier this month, a 23-yearold man was sentenced to five years in jail and fined ~9,000 for uploading videos of his ex-girlfriend on pornographic websites. It was the state Criminal Investigation Department’s first conviction in a cyber crime pertaining to “revenge porn”, a term used to describe sharing of sexually explicit images on the Internet with the intention of blackmailing or humiliating victims.
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