Bengaluru shame: Police detain 6 for New Year's Eve molestations, 4 for assault captured on CCTV

Bengaluru: Police in the southern Indian city of Bangalore detained at least six suspects on Wednesday after several women said they were groped and molested during New Year's Eve celebrations in the city that is the country's information technology hub. While four suspects were detained from an east Bangalore neighbourhood after CCTV footage emerged showing two men on a scooter molesting a lone woman in a dimly lit lane in the early hours of the New Year. Mass Molestation At least six suspects were detained by the police on Wednesday. City police first denied that any sexual harassment had taken place during the late-night celebrations. But on Wednesday, police officer Hemant Nimbalkar said at least six men were detained after several video clips of women being attacked by groups of men spread on social media. The incident happened on the night of December 31 at the city's MG Road and Brigade road, where people converged in large numbers to welcome the arrival of 2017. Photo: ABP News

• The police had earlier said that no one had come forward to file a complaint about the incidents.
• Since then, at least one woman has come forward to speak of how she was molested on Saturday night.
• Others have said that they saw women being molested or groped, and that revelers were making lewd remarks, even as the state government said that more than 1,500 police personnel had been deployed to control the crowds.
• The young woman who came forward, Chaitali Wasnick, told a news channel that she was heading home at around 1:30 a.m. when two men approached her, making her suspicious. "So I just moved aside, I let them pass," she said, adding that one man began to grope her.
• "I did not have any idea that he'd do that, so I went totally blank," Wasnick said, adding that no one came to her help her and that there were no police personnel around.
• As Bangalore newspapers published images of several women who allegedly had been groped or attacked, the state's home minister, G. Parameshwara, criticized young women for "copying the Westerners, not only in their mindset, but even in their dressing."
• "These kind of things do happen," he told reporters on Tuesday.

Molestation captured on CCTV Four suspects were detained from an east Bangalore neighbourhood on Wednesday. A crowd on Wednesday at the spot where the woman was attacked (Courtesy: The Telegraph, Calcutta)

• Police said one of the four was believed to be involved in the incident that took place around 2.40am on January 1 in Kammanahalli, a middle-class locality home to a large number of migrants, many of them students in Bangalore's tech colleges.
• Kammanahalli is 10km from central Bangalore's party hub of M.G. Road-Brigade Road where several women were groped and molested by drunken hoodlums two hours earlier, around 12.30am.

• No arrests have been made in this case despite CCTV footage and complaints from some of the women.
• City police chief Praveen Sood said the Kammanahalli footage was "credible evidence".
• The moment we received the credible evidence (the footage), we decided to file a case. We are sure of arresting the culprits soon." Eight more men were rounded up but were let off after questioning.
• The footage, of over a minute, shows two women getting out of an auto on Kammanahalli Main Road. While one moves out of the camera's coverage area, the other is seen walking to the poorly lit lane. Within seconds, the two men arrive on a scooter, one of them gets off and grabs the woman. He then drags her to the rider who, too, joins in the act and flings her to the ground when she resists.

• The attackers flee the scene after some time, the horror captured on the CCTV camera located outside a house.
• The owner of the house handed over the tape to the police, who have filed a case of sexual harassment, wrongful restraint and rash driving against "unknown persons".
• The victim is yet to come forward, prompting members of an Assembly committee on women's safety today to urge her to do so.