Peeping-Tom camera shock for Smriti

Smriti Irani comes out of the Goa showroom on Friday. (PTI)

Samyabrata Ray Goswami, TT, April 3: Union minister Smriti Irani today experienced the woman shopper's nightmare at a Goa apparel store: a security camera pointed at the fitting room where customers try out new clothes.

Smriti had just stepped into the "trial room" at a Fabindia outlet in North Goa's Candolim village when her assistant spotted the CCTV camera, placed strategically to video-graph the room.

By evening, police had formed a special squad to examine stores across the state's coastal belt for mischievously placed cameras.

Four store employees - Paresh Bhagat, Raju Payanche, Prashant Naik and Karim Lakhani - were first detained and then arrested late tonight.

Among them is the store manager, who had been on leave today but to whose computer the camera was connected, senior inspector Nilesh Rane said.

"The police have sealed the outlet. The top brass of Fabindia, including CEO and MD William Bissell, will be grilled on Saturday," superintendent of police Umesh Gaonkar toldThe Telegraph.

Fabindia is a Rs 1,000-crore clothes, fabric, furnishings and decor retail chain with an all-India presence. A company statement said it was "deeply concerned and shocked at this allegation" and was "in the process of investigating this internally and will be cooperating fully with the police", PTI reported.

The agency quoted Bissell as saying his stores had security cameras "in places where shoplifting can occur" but "they cannot see what is happening inside the trial room".

BJP spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi ran into controversy tonight by tweeting: "Do I smell a RAT 2 obfuscate the BJP nat. Executive meeting, attempts being made not to cover NE meeting instead cover some other inane issues?" An hour on, she tweeted she wasn't questioning "Smriti JI" but the media's emphasis.

Smriti and husband Zubin, who own a house in Tivim village, about 10km from Candolim, were spending Good Friday and the Easter weekend in Goa.

"The trial room had a full-length mirror on one wall and a door on the other. The camera was placed outside the room at a spot from where it could look into the room's mirror and record the image of anybody changing inside," officer Rane said.

He said the footage showed many customers trying out clothes. A case has been lodged under penal code sections 354C (voyeurism) and 509 (intrusion into privacy) against the employees monitoring the cameras. The state CID will probe the case.

"The footage and the hard drive of the computer are being sent for forensic analysis to check whether the videos had been shared with someone else," a Goa police source said.

Smriti accosted the store employees and called her husband, who contacted the police. Smriti then called Michael Lobo, her party MLA from nearby Calangute.

"I rushed to the store and together we viewed the footage, which revealed her images as well as those of others... both men and women shoppers," Lobo said.

PTI quoted Bissell as saying his staff had been unable to detect anything of what Lobo had said about the images. Political leaders across party lines demanded police action against Peeping-Tom CCTV cameras.

"Not just this boutique, all stores with such facilities must be investigated," Congress spokesperson Durgadas Kamat said.

Reports of mischievous shop cameras have come from elsewhere too. A Van Heusen showroom manager in Delhi and the owners of a Bangalore apparel shop were recently arrested on similar charges.

In 2010, a father of two was arrested in America for using CCTV cameras to film women in a store's changing room.

Guidelines for women shoppers on the use of fitting rooms and restrooms:

• Check for hidden, strange equipment;
• Bring anything suspicious to the manager's notice;
• On finding anything, lodge a police complaint;
• Spread awareness among relatives and friends.