A black magic practitioner has been taken into custody for allegedly sexually abusing a minor girl with mental illness in Hyderabad, on Tuesday. Moulana Abid Ali of Hyder Shah Koth, Rajender Nagar was accused of sexually abusing the minor multiple times on the pretext of treating her mental illness. Narsingi police have booked him under relevant sections of Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, and under sections 645, 365 and 708 of the IPC.
“We did not know he was a person who would do such things,“ said the brother in law of the 16-year-old survivor, who filed the case with the Narsingi police station under the Cyberabad commissionerate on Monday. “The girl has some mental illness and so we first took her to a hospital, but an auto driver told us to take her to the moulana for spiritual treatment. The sexual assault happened three months ago, but we got to know only now. We took her to his office six to seven times. The first time he did some ‘dua’ and left her. The next time, he took her to his cabin and kept her till 11.30 pm on the pretext of curing her through black magic,” he added.
The family stopped the visits as there was no improvement in the girl’s mental health. Soon, the accused started calling the survivor on phone asking her to return back to his office at Hyder Shah Koth again for further treatment.
Abid had allegedly threatened the minor by saying that if she failed to show up, he would do black magic on the girl and ruin her life.
“She started weeping non-stop after the threats, it was only we after asked her many times that she told us what had happened. She told us that the moulana would touch her private parts and forced himself on her. He threatened her that if she revealed this to anyone he would do black magic on the family,” the survivor’s brother-in-law said.
“The family of the survivor approached the police Monday night. Moulana was arrested from his residence in Hyder Shah Koth area on Tuesday morning. We are still investigating the case,” said KM Raghavendra, Sub-Inspector of Police, Narsingi police station.
If Abid was apprehended in Karnataka and not in Telangana, he would also have been booked under the Karnataka Prevention and Eradication of Inhuman Evil Practices and Black Magic Bill, 2017. This act is also known as the Anti-Superstition Bill. But Telangana has no such law and the state is no stranger to black magic related cases. In February, the severed head of a three-month-old baby was found a day after the Super Blue Blood Moon in Hyderabad. A couple allegedly beheaded the baby girl and kept her head under the moonlight during the lunar eclipse.