A special court has sentenced a 50-year-old man to five-years rigorous imprisonment for inappropriately touching a 10-year-old girl on her private parts during a short taxi ride from CST to Colaba.
On 25 March, 2018, around 9.15 pm the victim was commuting with her mother, a younger sibling, an aunt and a neighbour who were in the rear seat from CST station to their home in Colaba. The man Mohammed Ahmed, who worked as a help, also took the same cab from CST, as he was going to Colaba. The victim was about to go to her mother in the rear seat, but the stranger suggested to her mother that she could sit on his lap. Her mother allowed it.
After the group alighted at Colaba sweet mart, the girl started sobbing. She told her mother that the man, who was then following them, had touched her private parts during the ride. Immediately the women raised an alarm and asked the public to catch him. The public nabbed him and started beating him up. A bystander apprehended him and took him on his bike along with a friend as pillion to the Colaba police. A police complaint was lodged there by the victim’s mother.
During the trial, the child’s aunt who was present in the taxi and the bystander who took the man to the police station also testified.
Ahmed had suffered injuries after the crowd had assaulted him. The court said that the assault is a matter to be looked into by the police but that it shows he is the same man who commuted in the taxi with the family and abused the child.
The man, a father of five daughters, had claimed that he had been falsely implicated in the case by the police after he had gone to the police station to complain about the mob assault on him.
