Businessman Francis had installed a CCTV camera in his house at 5th Main in Kamanahalli in the heart of Bengaluru for his personal safety. On the evening of January 1, a young girl living in the area paid him a visit, asking him to check the CCTV footage from the wee hours of that morning.
She told him that she had been sexually assaulted and robbed.
“I watched the CCTV footage and I was shocked at what I saw. The girl had been sexually assaulted right next to my house,” Francis recalls.
The three-minute odd footage has caused national outrage. The footage recorded at 2.38 am on New Year’s Day shows two women getting down from an auto rickshaw. The first woman walks steadily and moves out of the camera’s view. The second woman pays the auto driver and walks into the dimly lit lane. Three bikes with two men on each arrive at the end of the street and one bike follows her into the lane.
One of them forcibly hugs her, sexually assaults her and drags her to his friend on the bike. The two men try to pull her clothes off. The girl puts up a brave fight through out and tried to overpower the guy. Finally, they push her on the road and leave.
“The first woman left in a hurry as she wanted to use the bathroom. The other woman had been assaulted and had lost her wallet. She wanted to see if the CCTV had recorded the bike’s registration number. She was in shock and was also worried that she was robbed. She had lost all her money and her debit card. When she saw that the bike’s number was not clear on the CCTV footage as the tail lamp was not on, she left,” Francis told The News Minute.
The two young working women were staying at a paying guest accommodation on the same lane.
After having seen the pictures of molestation from MG Road and Brigade Road on TV and newspapers , Francis then decided to hand over his footage to a newspaper. “The woman did not want to give a complaint, I had to give the footage to someone,” he says.
The Bengaluru police, that has come under a lot of flak lately, has lodged an FIR based on the footage.
For Francis, what he saw in the footage came as a huge shock. “I am born and brought up in Bangalore. I have never seen anything like this. This is not my city. Such things never happen in my city, or that’s what I had thought,” he said.