Bringing out yet another shocking aspect of Kerala’s online sex racket involving Kiss of love organisers Rahul Pasupalan and wife Rasmi R Nair, the police have learned that the racket’s kingpin had been using AIDS as an instrument to keep women trapped in the trade under him and to settle scores with his enemies.
Anoop, an aide of racket kingpin Joshi Joseph, alias Achayan, has reportedly told the police that Joshi used to make his 23-year-old driver, an AIDS patient, have sex with the girls in the racket who wanted to escape from his grip, in order to keep them trapped in the racket. Several of the women in Joshi’s racket could have contracted AIDS, according to Anoop.
Joshi, arrested a few days ago, not only forced the girls under his control to have sex with the AIDS patient using enticements and threats but also used this information to blackmail them as well as his opponents. The police believe that Anoop, a bank employee and a techie, had no role in the sex racket though he had been helping Joshi in business matters.
Joshi’s modus operandi was to send the girls, who had already had sex with the AIDS patient without being aware of his disease, to the “clients” who were not in good terms with him. later, he would tell them telephonically as to what had actually happened, according to the police who think that several persons could have fallen prey to Joshi’s revenge method.
The police have also learned that many women who were trapped in the racket in this manner had also become links in drug rackets. Joshi, who had connections with the drugs mafia, had tried to trap some of the girls in false narcotics-related cases with the help of certain police personnel in Kochi. Anoop is most likely to be made an approver.
The new disclosures have created fresh headache for the police as they now have to find out the “clients” who had come into contact with the women whom Joshi had forced to have sex with the AIDS patient. They also have to find out whether the racket had smuggled out any such girls to other countries as part of the flesh trade.
As per the information collected by the police, Joshi had been heading online and direct flesh trading for more than ten years. Investigators believe that Joshi had evaded arrest so far with the help of his connections in “high places”. Sources said that Joshi himself had made admissions in this regard to the police.
However, Joshi told newsmen on Friday that he had no connections with any online sex racket. As he was brought to Pattanakkad near Alappuzha as part of the police’s evidence-gathering exercise, he said that he had never known Rahul Pasupalan or his wife and model Rasmi Nair, who were arrested in the sex racket case on November 17 from near Kochi.
Joshi is an accused in the infamous Paravur and Varappuzha flesh trade cases and several cases are pending against him in the Ernakulam Rural and Kochi City police limits. The police had also arrested a Kasaragod-based gangster, Abdulkhader Afsal alias Akbar, a main agent of the racket who had been trafficking women to the Gulf, along with Rahul and Rasmi.
Meanwhile, Rasmi Nair, considered to be a vital link in the online sex racket, has already told the police that her husband Rahul had made her into a commodity for sale, according to sources. Rahul and Rasmi were the frontline organisers of Kiss of love, a programme held in several places in Kerala towards the end of last year to protest against moral policing.