The Special Investigation Team probing the alleged rape of a law student by Bharatiya Janata Party leader Swami Chinmayanand and also a related extortion case, filed a chargesheet in the court of Shahjahanpur’s Chief Judicial Magistrate Omveer Singh on Wednesday.
The SIT has filed a 4,700-page chargesheet and case diaries in connection with the probe which went on for about two months. Besides, separate chargesheets of 20 pages each were prepared for both the rape and extortion cases to facilitate court proceedings.
During the probe, the SIT recorded statements of 105 persons and collected 24 physical and 55 documentary evidences.
On Wednesday, the SIT reached the CJM’s court along with Swami Chinmayanand, who is currently in jail on charges of rape, amidst presence of a huge police force. After the former Union minister was produced in the court, he was sent back to jail.
Besides Chinmayanand, the law student, her friend Sanjay Singh, Vikram Singh and Sachin Sengar, who were accused of making extortion demands, were also presented in the court for jail.
The SIT will file its reply in the Allahabad High Court on Thursday and submit its ‘status report’ to the High Court on November 28.
Chinmayanand is lodged in the jail following the report lodged against him by the law student under Section 376C of the Indian Penal Code, an offence pertaining to the abuse of one’s position by a person in authority to ‘induce or seduce’ a woman under his charge to have ‘sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape’.
The four jailed accused in the extortion case are the law student who charged Chinmayanand with sexual harassment, Sanjay, Vikram and Sachin.
Head of the SIT, IG Naveen Arora had said on Tuesday that BJP leaders DPS Rathore and Ajit Singh had also been made accused in the extortion case.
The law student and her three male friends were booked under sections 35 (criminal act done with a criminal knowledge or intention), 385 (extortion), 506 (criminal intimidation), 201 (disappearance of evidences) of the IPC and Section 67 of the Information Technology Act.
The 72-year-old Chinmayanand also faces the charges of stalking under Section 354 D, wrongful confinement under Section 342 and criminal intimidation under Section 506 of the IPC.
The SIT was constituted by the Uttar Pradesh government on the orders of the Supreme Court in September to investigate the charges levelled by the woman, who was then a postgraduate student at a college run by Swami Chinmayanand’s trust.
The woman went missing on August 24, a day after she posted a video on social media alleging that a “senior leader of the sant community” was harassing and threatening to kill her.
Her father had filed a complaint with the police, accusing Chinmayanand of sexually harassing her, a charge refuted by the former Union minister’s lawyer who claimed it was a “conspiracy” to blackmail him.
Chinmayanand was later arrested on September 21.
