The investigations into the sale and transmission of the MMS clip involving two Delhi Public School students in a sexual act took a dramatic turn when a student of geophysics at IIT, Kharagpur, was arrested this evening on the campus.
Ravi Raj, 23, an eighth-semester student, was arrested by a team of the Economic Offences Wing of Delhi Police. A case had been registered by the police last Thursday under sections 292 and 294 (sale of obscene material) of the IPC and section 67 of the IT Act after it came to their notice that MMS was being sold in 2.37-minute CDs in the market and on Baazee.com, for Rs 125.
One team had been despatched to Mumbai to the office of Baazee.com and another to Kharagpur, where the seller, Alice Electronic, was based. ‘‘When we accessed the server of Baazee, we found the address of the seller as Alice—elec nee Alice Electronics, psell@sify.com, Kharagpur,’’ said Prabhakar, DCP, EOW.
Registration at Baazee is free and the portal allots a unique ID and a password to each seller.
Details of the buyers, eight in all, were acquired from the portal and it was found that two of them were from Delhi. On their questioning, it was revealed that they had made the payment through online bank transfer through HDFC and ICICI banks.
‘‘The payment is made to paisapay.com, an allied website of the portal, from where it is sent to the seller, either online or through draft,’’ Prabhakar said. It was revealed that a sum of Rs 17,787.87 had been sent through an HDFC bank draft to the seller which was deposited in his UTI bank account, the police said.
Ravi Raj, it was alleged, had been selling products — cameras, DVD player, condoms etc — on the portal regularly.
His address was tracked down to D 225, Rajendra Prasad Hall, IIT campus, Kharagpur, where the drafts were being sent.
When the police team reached the campus, Ravi Raj’s room was found to be locked. ‘‘He had given the impression to his friends that he had left for Hazaribagh but he was in Kharagpur,’’ Prabhakar said. His father, Ramakant Singh, is in-charge of a regional store of the Jharkhand government and stays at Kuju, Hazaribagh, while the family belongs to Rohtas, Bihar.
The police found a friend of Ravi Raj from whom they got his mobile number. He was called up and told he was wanted at the Registrar’s office. When he came to the office, he was questioned in the Registrar’s presence and all documents, including the bank slips and paying slips, produced.
Ravi Raj allegedly confessed to his role and was arrested around 6.30 pm. He will be produced in a local court tomorrow from where the police would seek his transit remand. He is expected to be in Delhi on Thursday.
‘‘The boy deserves to be arrested because he was involved in a serious crime. He has tarnished the image of this institution,’’ said S K Dube, director, IIT.
How the clip was clinched
This is how the EOW team cracked the case. First, the details of the administrative contact of Baazee.com was downloaded from checkdomain.com and the sales manager at the Delhi office of the portal, at Community Centre, East of Kailash, questioned. The police then acquired a copy of the clip, listed as item number 27877408, from the head, Trust and Safety, at the portal and details of the eight buyers.
It was found that two of them were students of private engineering colleges of Delhi — one stays at Shalimar Bagh and the other at Keshavpuram. (Names withheld). The clip had been sent to them through e-mail. The payments can be made to the portal in four ways — auction, classified, maximum bid and quick buy. The two had opted for quick buy. The attachment was entitled dps—rkpuram—sex—scandal.zip from seller alice—elec for Rs 125 plus Rs 2.50.
The download from one computer could be seized; the other had deleted the file. This person’s inbox contained the confirmatory order from Baazee but he was not found to have forwarded the e-mail to anyone. While one of the buyers had found the CD listed under ‘Jeans’ category, the one whose computer was seized had found it under ‘e-book/fiction’.
-Tushar Srivastava