New Delhi: A Varanasi court has issued a non-bailable warrant against the 24-year-old woman who has accused BSP MP Atul Rai of sexual assault. The warrant was issued in a forgery case that was registered based on a complaint by the MP’s brother.
According to the Indian Express, Rai’s brother had accused the woman of forging documents to “hide her date of birth”. Rai, the MP from Ghosi in Mau, has been in jail since June 2019 in connection with the rape case.
The woman, a resident of Mau, had filed a case against Rai in 2019, accusing him of sexually harassing her for nearly a year. She claimed that Rai had “made a video” and threatened to circulate it on social media, according to the newspaper.
The police said they had sought a non-bailable warrant against the woman because she “remained untraceable despite several raids”.
The Indian Express report says that Pawan Kumar’s complaint claimed that the woman’s birthdate was shown as March 10, 1997 in a high school marks sheet she had produced while getting an FIR registered against a student leader in 2015. However, when the rape case against Rai was registered in 2019, the date of birth on the high school marks sheet read June 10, 1997.
According to the Indian Express, the police had registered an FIR against the woman and an associate after a court’s directive. The case mentions sections 419 (cheating by personation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property), 467 (forgery of valuable security, will, etc) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy), among others.
Meanwhile, sub-inspector Girja Shankar, the Investigating Officer in the forgery case, said the probe is underway and they are looking for the woman.