Bengaluru: After the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the cases of sexual abuse against suspended Janata Dal(Secular) (JD(S)) leader Prajwal Revanna didn’t seek further custody, a Bengaluru court on Monday (June 10) has sent him to judicial custody until June 24, Live Law reported.
In the early hours of May 31, Prajwal was arrested by the Karnataka police as soon as he arrived at the Bengaluru airport from Munich. He had fled to Germany using his diplomatic passport on April 26, soon after thousands of videos of him sexually abusing women became public.
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The former Hassan MP was sent to police custody until June 6, which was later extended to June 10.
On May 18, a special court had issued an arrest warrant against Prajwal. Three FIRs have been filed so far against him in cases related to alleged sexual abuse.
In April, several videos had surfaced in which multiple instances of what look like forceful and non-consensual sexual acts committed by the suspended JD(S) leader were documented. Notably, in most of the recordings it looked like women were recorded by him under some form of duress and without their consent. An SIT was formed by the Siddaramaiah-led government on April 27 to probe these cases. As per a Times of India report, the police is yet to recover the phone “with which the recording was done”.
In the Hassan seat, Prajwal was the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) nominee in the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls and has lost against Congress’s Shreyas Patel by a margin of 43,588 votes.
Several reports have suggested that the leadership of both the JD(S) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership were aware of the allegations against Prajwal before he was re-nominated from the Hassan seat. He was suspended from the JD(S) on April 30.