Kolkata: Engineer held for harassing girl online

KOLKATA: The Salt Lake police on Friday arrested a 31-year-old Rourkela-based electrical engineer who was holed up in Puri after allegedly harassing a girl from Odisha and her roommate in Salt Lake by uploading their morphed nude pictures on a social networking site and even giving their cellphone numbers on escort service websites.
A Puri court on Friday allowed a two-day transit remand and the engineer was produced in a Bidhannagar court on Sunday.

According to sources, the accused, Manoj Nanda, who worked in a multinational conglomerate, was in a relationship with the Odisha girl. According to police, the girl decided to call off their relationship. For the last two years, Manoj has been repeatedly harassing and blackmailing her, the FIR says. The girl, scared about her future, left Rourkela and took up a job in Salt Lake Sector V only to get rid of her tormentor. In Kolkata, she met another girl and they became friends. The survivor then moved to her friend’s home.

But Manoj kept harassing her — now on social media. The engineer, police claimed, kept harassing the girl and her Kolkata friend on Facebook and WhatsApp. He even uploaded the cellphone number of the survivor’s Kolkata friend on an escort service website. Some nude photographs of the survivor from Odisha was uploaded on Facebook and mailed to her. Manoj also morphed her Kolkata friend’s photograph and sent the nude photographs through WhatsApp, threatening to make them public.

Harassed and humiliated, the two girls lodged a complaint with the Salt Lake cybercrime police on March

3. Police had since been tracking Manoj. Sources said though he works in Rourkela, Manoj had been staying in Puri’s Jagannath Colony. Police on Friday arrested him from there and produced him before a Puri chief judicial magistrate. The court granted him twoday transit remand, on which he was brought to Salt Lake and produced in a local court on Sunday. Police said in addition to questioning Manoj they will be pleading before the court to allow that the in-camera statements of the two girls are recorded before a judicial magistrate.