Guwahati: In a significant breakthrough following nearly seven months of investigation, the Crime Branch of the Police Commissionerate in Guwahati has successfully cracked a cybercrime case.
The case involves the arrest of a man accused of sending vulgar messages via phone and circulating morphed pictures of female students from a local college on social media networking sites.
The complaint lodged with the crime branch of the city Police Commissionerate dates back to September 28 last year from a girl whose identity has been withheld. The female student and some of her friends, all students of a college in the city, were receiving unsolicited phone calls and messages from a person who identified himself as Nabajit Nath alias Nabajit Talukdar, using different mobile phone numbers.
“The accused also sent some vulgar messages as well as some obscene morphed pictures of some of the girls. He even circulated obscene morphed pictures of these girls on various social media platforms. The accused warned the girls over the phone and messages of facing dire consequences if they disclosed the matter to others,” an official statement issued here said.
In this connection, a case (cyber police station case number 09/2023) under Section 509 of IPC, read with Sections 67-A/67-B of the Information Technology Act, 2000 was registered and investigated.
Based on technical analysis, it was found that the accused was in Bengaluru, Karnataka, and his other details were collected using technical and human Intelligence and put under surveillance. A crime branch team of the Police Commissionerate, Guwahati located the accused in Bengaluru.
“On further investigation, the identity of the accused was established and he was found to be one Md Billal Hussain, 22, of Thekerabari under Dhula police station in Darrang, who was operating from Bangalore and absconding. The crime branch team kept pursuing him and finally arrested him from Dhula on Wednesday,” it said.
During interrogation, the accused confessed to his crime. The police team also seized his mobile phone along with some SIM cards used in the commission of crime.
The arrested accused was produced before a court on Wednesday and taken on police remand for five days.
Investigation revealed that the arrested accused person identified himself as Nabajit Nath alias Nabajit Talukdar on social media platforms and got acquainted with one of the victims. The accused established a close relationship with one victim by claiming that he worked in a certain company. Later on, the accused also took control of the WhatsApp number of the victim.
Neither the complainant nor any of her friends ever saw the accused physically. The interaction was only over social media networking sites and phone calls.
Gradually, the victim discovered that the accused person was not permanently employed anywhere and lacked sufficient education. Upon realising this, the complainant decided to cut off all communication with the accused individual. However, despite this action, the complainant remained unaware of the true identity of the accused person.
Once the communication was halted by the complainant, the accused turned vindictive. He resorted to threatening the complainant, stating that he would ruin her life if communication was not resumed. In response to these threats, the complainant and a few of her friends took a firm stand and rebuked the accused person over the phone for his obsessive and threatening behavior.
In response to the firm stand taken by the complainant and her friends, the accused resorted to a malicious plan to harm their reputation. He collected photographs of the victim and other girls from social media platforms and proceeded to morph these innocent images into explicit and nude pictures. Using various phone numbers, the accused then circulated these morphed obscene pictures to the complainant and her friends via WhatsApp messages.
The accused went even further by uploading these morphed obscene pictures on social media platforms. Using these pictures as leverage, he began blackmailing the complainant and her friends, demanding illegal and unacceptable favours from these girls.
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During the investigation, it came to light that the accused individual had not even completed his matriculation. Prior to the incident, he was employed as a security guard at a private establishment in Bangalore.
Interestingly, he concealed his true religious identity and adopted a Hindu name, Nabajit Nath alias Nabajit Talukdar, to establish communication and a relationship with the complainant, who herself belongs to the Hindu religion.
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