Coimbatore youth held after parents of schoolgirl who ended life claim he was blackmailing her

COIMBATORE: Coimbatore district (rural) police arrested a 20-year-old youth on Thursday evening for allegedly abetting the suicide of a 17-year-old schoolgirl near Annur.

The youth is alleged to have blackmailed her with her videos and photos. Since the girl’s parents filed a complaint against him, police said that two other women have come forward to lodge similar complaints against the youth, identified as Gowtham, hailing from a village near Annur.
  
Police said Gowtham had taken obscene videos and photos of the schoolgirl and tried to blackmail her and mentally harass her into accepting his proposal for a relationship. Unable to bear this, the girl, a class 12 student at a government school, allegedly consumed a poisonous substance on September 10.
  
Her parents rushed her to a private hospital at Annur where she received first aid before being referred to the Coimbatore Medical College Hospital (CMCH). However, she died while on the way to the hospital. Her father, a daily wage labourer, and mother, a textile mill employee, initially told police that she might have taken her life as they had scolded her for spending hours on the mobile phone. Based on this, Annur police registered a case under Section 174 CrPC (unnatural death) and handed over her body for cremation, after completing the postmortem.
  
Some days later, however, the girl’s mother lodged a complaint with Coimbatore rural police, seeking action against her neighbour for allegedly having taken obscene videos and photos of her daughter. She claimed that he had threatened to share the videos and photos on social media if she did not have a relationship with him. The girl’s mother stressed that this was the trigger for the suicide. 
  
Based on the complaint, Annur police altered the case to 306 (abetment of suicide) of IPC and arrested the youth on Thursday evening. Later, he was remanded to judicial custody. Subsequently, two other women approached the police and said he had threatened them in a similar manner.