Con woman Saritha S Nair, the main accused in Kerala’s infamous solar scam, is back in political and media focus after a gap of several months with the surfacing of some porn video clippings allegedly featuring her, which went viral over WhatsApp and other social media networks. The videos’ surfacing has also rekindled discussions on her reported relationships with certain top political leaders.
Saritha, 37, has claimed that the woman featured in the porn videos is not her but someone else and the police have launched an investigation to find out the source of the video, who uploaded it and who all had accessed it and shared it. The police would also look into her complaint that some people based abroad had been issuing threats to her over the phone.
The con woman, who had given sleepless nights to several young politicians in Kerala last year with her threat to “reveal everything” connected to the solar scam, has said that there could be a political conspiracy behind the surfacing of the videos, implying that certain political leaders could have played a part in it.
Biju Radhakrishnan, Saritha’s co-accused in the solar scam and her former live-in partner, had through his counsel ‘disclosed’ in November last that there were videos proving illicit relationships between her and Kerala’s Tourism Minister AP Anil Kumar, Alappuzha MP KC Venugopal, then a Union Minister, and former State minister KB Ganesh Kumar.
A series of revealing video clippings featuring Saritha Nair had surfaced on WhatsApp last Sunday and had gone viral with millions viewing them within a few hours. Saritha said that the videos were fake and had been created by superimposing visuals of her face and the body of some other woman. The investigators are reportedly unprepared to trust this claim totally.
In her complaint to the Chief Judicial Magistrate Court of Pathanamthitta, filed on Wednesday, Saritha said the videos were aimed at degrading her dignity as a woman. She had on Tuesday morning reportedly admitted that the woman featured in the videos was she herself but by evening she changed her version.
Asked about the possible source of her pictures in the videos, she said she had handed over her laptop and mobile phones to the police after her arrest in the solar scam in June, 2013. She had claimed that she had deleted all her pictures from the gadgets but she did not know that deleted items could be retrieved.
For the police, finding out the source of the video is not a difficult job but they think that it could most probably have been uploaded from a country with flexible cyber laws. Still, booking all those who had accessed, viewed and shared the videos would be a near-impossible task as the number of such people might come to millions.
Saritha was arrested in June, 2013 in the solar scam, which had rocked the Kerala political scene and taken the Congress-led UDF Government to the verge of collapse many times. The scam pertained to duping of several people in Kerala of crores of rupees by Saritha and Biju through their company, Team Solar, promising to install solar power projects.
It was alleged that the duo had been committing these frauds with the active support of Chief Minister Oommen Chandy’s personal assistants Tenny Joppen and Jikkumon Jacob, former gunman Salim Raj and others. Chandy was forced to take action against them after it was proved that they were in regular contact with Saritha over the phone and in person.
Chandy himself was trapped in the solar scam after a businessman alleged that Saritha had taken him to meet the Chief Minister in his office. Chandy had claimed that he never knew such a woman but his defences crumbled after a picture showing Saritha whispering in his ears during a public programme at Kadaplamattom in Kottayam district appeared in the media.
