VIJAYAWADA: A woman complained of online harassment by a student to Commissioner of Police KV Rajendranath Reddy today. The Commissioner directed the officials to register a case under Section 66 of the IT Act and handed it over to the CID for further investigation.
Jyothirmayee alias Jyothi, a resident of Ramalingeswara Nagar in Vijayawada, a graduate, got married in 2004.
Since then, she settled down in Hyderabad with her husband and had worked in a consultancy for two and an half years.
As part of her job she interacted with a client, Karthik, a B Tech student, and later on they became good friends. Karthik used to maintain a close relationship with Jyothi by calling her sister and became close even to the other family members.
Karthik joined Stanford University, Manchester of United Kingdom in October, 2008. Meanwhile, both Jyothi and her husband, Devender, an employee in Indigo Air lines in Hyderabad, resigned their jobs and returned to their home town Vijayawada.
Jyothi started an education consultancy agency along with four partners, including Karthik, at Machavaram in Vijayawada in May this year. Since then, Jyothi’s problems started and she went into depression as her e mail-Ids were hacked. She started getting abusive mails and her face morphed with nude photos every day.
Then, she had approached the local police who referred it to the Hyderabad Cyber Crime Police.
In the initial stage, the police did not show much interest in taking her complaint. However, when she approached the DGP and Home Minister Sabitha Indra Reddy, the police registered a case in August, 2009 and found that the abusive e-mails originated from Stanford University’s server and these were being sent by Karthik.
Then, Jyothi lodged a complaint with the Stanford University through e-mail against Karthik and unravelled Karthik’s dubious behaviour. Responding to it immediately, the University expelled him two months ago after an investigation.
Karthik, son of an IFS officer soon after returning to India, intensified harassment by threatening phone calls and sending the face morphing nude photographs of Jyothi to her e-mail every day.
Unable to bear his harassments, Jyothi along with her husband and Congress leaders P Gowtham Reddy and Tadi Shakuntala besides some other women organisation’s leaders today met the Vijayawada Police Commissioner and demanded that Karthik be arrested immediately.
The Police Commissioner ordered the officials to register a case under Section 66 IT Act and handed it over to the CID for further investigation.
` My personal life was completely spoilt by him. He is threatening that my face morphed nude photos would be put on the Internet.
I am depressed and unable to show my face to anybody,’ Jyothi lamented.
She alleged that Karthik’s father, E Narsimlu, working as Forest Conservator in Kurnool was trying to weaken the case and carrying on a misinformation campaign against her using his position.