NEW DELHI: The CBI has arrested the wife of a junior engineer in the Uttar Pradesh Irrigation Department who was nabbed earlier for alleged sexual exploitation of children, officials said Monday.
The agency took Durgawati, the wife of Ram Bhuvan Yadav, into custody and produced her before a competent court on Monday, they said.
The agency is yet to give a formal reason for Durgawati's arrest, but sources have indicated that she was allegedly influencing witnesses in the case.
Before his arrest, Yadav allegedly exploited about 50 children, all males, in the districts of Chitrakoot, Banda and Hamirpur for over a decade and sold the recordings of his nefarious activities on dark web, they said.
Yadav was suspended by the government after his arrest.
Yadav is believed to have told the investigators that he was silently preying upon poor children aged between 5 and 16, they said.
He used to buy their silence using cash and gifts of electronic gadgets such as mobile phones, they said.
The modus operandi adopted by the accused helped him stay away from the radar of investigating agencies.
A newly established special CBI unit, which is handling online child sexual abuse, has started tracking and apprehending paedophiles operating on the internet and busted his alleged activities after trailing him for days, they said.
The accused, a resident of Chitrakoot district in Uttar Pradesh, was arrested from Banda by the Special Unit of the CBI specialising in 'Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Prevention/ Investigation' (OCSAE) in one such operation in November this year.
"Apart from the physical abuse of these children, the accused also allegedly recorded their acts using their mobile phones, laptops and other electronic devices. It was further alleged that these photographs and video films containing child sexual abuse material were published and transmitted by the accused using the internet," CBI Press Information Officer R K Gaur had said after the arrest.