Gnanasekaran, the man arrested for sexually assaulting a student of Anna University inside the campus, held her in illegal custody for 40 minutes, filmed her, threatened her, and then blackmailed her by giving three options, the FIR in the case reveals.
The man, who was arrested by the Greater Chennai Police (GCP) on Wednesday, December 25, is also a habitual offender and has seven other pending cases against him, the police said. Soon after his arrest, allegations of him having links to Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s (DMK) emerged as several pictures of him with DMK functionaries were posted on social media.
According to the First Information Report (FIR) filed by the All Women Police Station (AWPS) Raja Annamalai Puram, the accused had filmed the survivor and her boyfriend inside the Anna University campus on Monday, December 23. The accused had threatened to leak the footage to the dean and the couple’s parents if they didn’t obey his orders.
He then took the survivor to an abandoned road behind the Highway Lab Building and the EEE department building and threatened her with three options. One was to be expelled from the university by the dean based on the footage he threatened to leak; the second was for her to “spend time” with him; and the third was to “spend time” with another man who had reportedly called the accused before the assault took place.
The survivor in her written complaint had said that the accused had received a phone call from an unknown person to whom he said that he would threaten the girl and leave her. He then sexually assaulted the survivor between 7:45 pm and 8:20 pm on December 23, the FIR dated December 24, said. He had also taken a picture of the girl’s college identification card and taken the survivor’s father’s contact number from her phone before fleeing the scene.
The police said that Gnanasekaran had previously been booked under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 457 (lurking, house-trespass, or house-breaking by night to commit offence) and 380 (theft in dwelling house) in seven pending criminal cases. He has now been booked under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) sections 63(a) (rape), 64(1) (punishment for rape), 75(1)(ii) (sexual harassment), and 75 (1)(iii) (sexual harassment) for sexually assaulting a student of Anna University.
Gnanasekaran is also alleged to have links to DMK functionaries. Several pictures of the accused with Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin and the Minister for Health and Family Welfare Department, Ma Subramanian, among others, have surfaced on social media.
Following the assault, Anna University promised to implement additional security measures on the campus. A joint security review will also be conducted by the police and the university’s security officers to improve the security measures, a police statement said.