A woman, in her 30s, who allegedly honey-trapped and blackmailed a BJP MP, was arrested from her home in Ghaziabad on Tuesday. The woman was picked up from her residence in Ghaziabad and questioned, following which she was arrested by the New Delhi district police.
KC Patel, the MP from Valsad in Gujarat, had filed a police complaint on Saturday claiming that he had been drugged by the woman who had taken obscene videos and photographs of him.
The woman had approached a city court claiming that the police had not acted on her rape complaint against the lawmaker.
Officers said that she has been booked under the Prevention of Corruption Act since she had claimed in front of Patel that she will have to pay the magistrate, police to hush up the rape case.
Anybody who indulges in extortion in the name of Government departments is likely to be booked under PoC Act, police said.
Police said the woman had allegedly installed CCTV cameras inside her house at strategic locations and she used those recordings to extort money. Police are also probing about her other gang members and how much money she had amassed through extortion.
Police have also recovered some videos and are searching for other people whom she had targeted. There are some recordings that are in police’s possession where she can be heard bargaining with her targets.
Sources said that the woman targeted MPs who are above 60 and would do a full research on their profile and their paying capacity. Till now, she has not targeted MPs based in Delhi.
In the case of KC Patel, she had found his number through a website that has details of MPs and contacted him while he was in his constituency on the pretext of getting some work done, sources said.
Patel told police that when he had asked the woman how she got his number, she said that she somehow managed to. She claimed that she is a Supreme Court lawyer. Police also said that they are verifying whether she is a lawyer or not.
“Police have read some of the application she has filed in the court and they were replete with errors. She didn’t even know how to spell Patiala House Court,” a police official claimed.
She is an “ambitious woman” and it is suspected that she had been following this modus operandi of blackmailing politicians from the last three years.
She had bought her first camera around three years back and would keep a camera hidden in her bag. She has even contested the Gram Pradhan elections from somewhere in Uttar Pradesh.
It is also suspected that she has the backing of a notorious gangster from there, sources claimed. The MP claimed that she had threatened to file a rape case against him if he did not pay her `5 crore.
Patel had alleged the woman invited him to a place in Ghaziabad for some work and offered him a soft drink laced with sedatives.
She had also filed a rape case against a Haryana MP last year at Tilak Marg police station but later changed her statement. It is suspected that she received `1.60 crore from the MP for steeling the case. She had conned several MPs but none of them came forward to file a police complaint since their reputation was at stake. Police have launched a probe and will find details of other victims who had been blackmailed by her, sources in Delhi Police said.