Bengaluru: Police have now booked a case against a man who filmed the brutal assault on a woman, accused of stealing a sari, after registering a case against the assaulters and arresting them.The video of the assault went viral on social media after Ankit Jain, owner of a shop on Avenue Road, recorded it on his mobile phone and shared it with his contacts. According to police, he should have reported the incident while the assault was taking place or handed over the video to police. Ironically, a Hoysala patrol team visited the spot during the incident, detained the woman, but failed to gather details of the assault. The special branch duty police also didn’t have any idea about the assault for four days until the video became public. On Sept 21, a woman was assaulted by Umed Ram, owner of Maya Silks store on Avenue Road, and his staffer Mahendra Seervi in full public view for allegedly stealing a sari bundle the previous day, according to the complaint filed by police constable Madhu BJ of City Market police station. The duo kicked her on the chest and private parts with their shoes and grabbed her by the legs. They tried to disrobe her and abused her. A non-cognisable register (NCR) was registered on Sept 26, and with the court’s permission, an FIR has been registered under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) section 239 (intentional omission to give information of offence by person bound to inform) against Jain. However, the decision has not gone well with the shopkeepers. They are questioning as to why police did not investigate the assault on the woman. “Police should have inquired with the public. How can they blindly detain a woman without knowing about the incident completely?” they ask. A senior officer claimed the woman didn’t inform about the assault during interrogation, medical test, or when she was produced in court. There were no visible injuries on her body. Police didn’t verify the CCTV footage of the shops around the place where she was assaulted as they detained her on Umed Ram’s complaint. The woman is in judicial custody now. On Sept 25, police got to know about the video and registered a case against the assaulters and sent them to jail. “It is not about discouraging people from filming such videos, but we want to create awareness on the responsibility of alerting police,” an officer said. Suddaguntepalya police had earlier booked a similar case against a pro-Kannada activist for circulating the CCTV footage of a man stabbing a woman to death in a paying guest accommodation in July last year.
