Bhopal: A Special Investigation Team (SIT) constituted by the Madhya Pradesh police to probe a sensational honey trapping and blackmailing scandal busted here recently has received clues on the luring of young girls by a gang to satisfy ‘pleasure-seeking’ VIPs to secure government contracts for their client companies, a member of the SIT said on Friday.
The SIT member disclosed that the name of a girl surfaced when the probe team was making an on-the-spot investigation in a hotel in the district headquarters town of Indore in Madhya Pradesh to verify the statement of one of the accused in the racket. The allegation was that an engineer of the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) had sex with her in a room there.
“During investigation, it was found that another girl was in the hotel besides Monica Yadav, the primary accused, with the IMC engineer on the night. We are trying to identify the girl,” the SIT member, unwilling to be quoted, said.
One of the key accused in the ring was filming when the engineer was having sex with the girl, the SIT member said, adding that the engineer was asked to give Rs 3 crore with the threat of making his video viral if he refused to heed her demand.
The engineer, Harbhajan Singh, later filed a complaint with the local police station bringing the racket to light.
“We suspect that the gang had lured young girls into the illicit trade of honeytrapping and blackmailing the VIPs”, the SIT member said.
“We are probing the transactions made in the bank accounts of the accused to zero in on the beneficiary companies in the honey trapping scandal,” Indore district senior superintendent of police Ms. Ruchi Vardhan Mishra, one of the SIT members, said.
“Arti Dayal (one of the key accused in the racket) has confessed to her role in the racket,” she said.
Four women and their driver were arrested in connection with the racket here last week.
In another development, Arti Dayal told reporters while being taken into police custody that she was forced to sign on a blank paper by police.
Meanwhile, Madhya Pradesh cooperation minister Govind Singh on Friday announced that the honeytrapped babus should be publicly paraded as they had compromised the government’s interest.
