CHENNAI: The city police were on Tuesday night questioning a 30-year-old man suspected of raping two women, a homemaker and a software engineer, after threatening them at knifepoint on two successive days in JJ Nagar, Mogappair East.
Investigators said 25-yearold Usha*, a junior software analyst, on Tuesday morning lodged a complaint with the JJ Nagar police, stating that a stranger had raped her in the early hours of Tuesday.
The police picked up the suspect, a man who lives in the locality, after Usha’s neighbour, Kausalya*, 30, said the man had sexually assaulted her in similar circumstances 24 hours earlier. The police, who are yet to file a first information report, have sent
Usha for medical tests. The suspect could be responsible for both crimes, investigators said, but only
Kausalya said she could identify the man.
(*names changed to protect identity)
After techie plaint, woman tells cops of rape
Usha, who has lived alone in the locality for three years, told investigators that she returned home from workin theearly hoursofTuesday and fell asleep.
“She heard the doorbell ring on the ground floor at 2am and answered it to find a stranger standing in the darkness outside,” an investigating officer said.
Usha told the police that she could not see his features but a knife he brandished gleamed in the shadows. He shoved her inside and pushed her on a bed, holding the knife to her throat and warning her not to raise an alarm. Scared for her life, Usha offered to give him her gold chain. “But the man raped her at knifepoint instead and then escaped from the scene,” the officer quoted Usha as saying.
Usha called her father, who live in Vandavasi, Tiruvannamalai district, and told him what had happened. Relatives rushed to the city and helped her file a police complaint.
When the police arrived at Usha’s house after the complaint, Kausalya, the neighbour, informed them that a man had raped her too. Kausalya, whose husband works abroad, has two children, a son and an 18-month-old daughter. The family had moved to the locality only on Sunday morning, next-door to her motherin-law. “The woman identified her neighbour as the culprit,” the officer said. “She said the man entered her house when she went to the bathroom outside the house and her daughter was asleep. Her son was staying over the night in his grandmother’s house.”
Kausalya told TOI that she suspects that the man entered the house at1.30am on Monday and hid in the kitchen. He remained in the house for two hours, she said, breaking down as she recalled the horror.
“The man pulledout a knife and threatened to kill my daughter. I pleaded with him to spare her and to leave us alone but he was adamant,” Kausalya said, adding that, after he raped her, the man took her cellphone andcheckedher contacts.
“He asked me whether I had seen him in the locality,” she said. “He took my phone number and warned me against telling anyone about him or what he had done.”
Kausalya mustered up the courage to speak about the crime only on Tuesday, after she learned that Usha had made a police complaint about a similar offence.
Investigators said they did not have sufficient evidence as yet to charge the suspect. “By the time the second complainant made her charges, it was too late to obtain evidence of the crime from her through a medicalexamination,”theofficer said. “We are awaiting results from the first complainant’s tests and are continuing to question the suspect.”
(*names of victims changed to protect identity)
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