Cyber crime accused who morph the pictures of minors will be slapped with POCSO

Dwaipayan Ghosh| TNN | Nov 3, 2016, KOLKATA: The cyber cell of detective department has decided to slap charges under stringent charges of POCSO if they found a minor's photographed morphed for criminal activities. The police say that this became necessary to send the message that cyber bullying of minor girls is a serious offence as the physical sexual abuse.

As a first step, Krishna Sekhar alias Kishan (22) - who had been arrested on Wednesday for extorting money from a 15-year-old Tiljala school student after hacking her Facebook profile - has been slapped with even IPC charges pertaining to molestation.

"The offence is severe and the victim faces severe mental trauma just like when the crime is committed physically. We are also putting extra effort to use all evidence to strengthen our chargesheet. Just like in an abuse against woman case, we will have maximum witnesses and the chargesheet will go beyond the technical aspects," said a senior IPS officer at Lalbazar.

Meanwhile, police claimed that kishan, a second year student of AJC Bose College and residing at Entally, was treated as a nerd by his family. He had recently bought an Apple i-phone and would walk out of conversations with his parents just to be able to stay hooked to internet. He was rarely interested in his family business - his father and elder brother are whole sale rice traders.

"All along his father thought his son was downloading his notes from his professors in college or studying for his exams using the tabs. In reality, it was all about him chatting up with girls across various social media platforms and trying to extort money once they fell in his trap," said an investigator. The 15-year-old whom he had lured into his trap had even met him once merely on the basis of a few conversations they had on Facebook Messenger.

The accused had managed to convince the girl to share some of her photos even though she had initially categorized them as private. "In both instances - the accused and the victim - there was serious lack of control on behalf of the parents. We have found that the accused had stopped communicating with the rest of his family, but to his parents this never appeared odd," said an investigating officer.