Man rapes over 70 children in last 12 years
published Jan. 27, 2021, 5:34 p.m. by mariamagboola
Man rapes over 70 children in last 12 years
Police in India have arrested a government official who allegedly had been abusing children between the ages five and 16 for over ten years.
Rambhawan 41, a junior Engineer with Uttar Pradesh government’s irrigation department in Chitrakoot was alleged to have molested over 70 children mainly boys in the last 12 years.
He was alleged to be recording the pedophilia acts and selling the Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on the secretive, worldwide dark web.
¬Describing his pedophilic acts as perhaps the biggest reported child sex abuse racket nationally and -internationally in all its ramifications, the country’s Central Bureau of Investigation CBI said his victims spread across three districts of UP—Banda, Chitrakoot and Hamirpur.
An India National Newspaper reported that a relatively new department of the CBI—the Online Child Sex Abuse Exploitation (OCSAE) Prevention and Investigation Unit—received the first information regarding the abuse of children from Interpol in September last year.
It probed into the dark web and kept eye on criminal activities going on there. “We received a short clip that showed an Indian-looking man ¬sexually abusing a child”.
‘We found several such videos and photographs on sites that have CSAM. Many of them are pay walled. They had been shared on various global sites—Russian, European and American. His face was not even clearly visible,” reveals a CBI officer.
A search at Rambhawan’s home led to the ¬recovery of several gadgets including ten mobile phones, two high-end laptops, a digital video recorder, a web-camera, six pen drives, memory cards and a variety of sex toys in addition to unaccounted cash. He also had PS4, a popular gaming console, at his home where he allowed the older children to play games.
The report said investigations revealed that some of the victims were abused as many as 50 to 60 times by the accused and to their shock some of his earliest victims have turned into abusers themselves.
Most of the abused children were from poor socioeconomic strata and their silence had earned them good money with most of them coming from his neighbourhood and from construction sites where he was supervising work as a junior engineer, besides children of his relatives, domestic help, ¬milkman and tailor.
Rambhawan’s wife was also arrested along with him for conspiracy and for threatening the victims. She was allegedly turning a blind eye to screams for help from the children while they were being assaulted. “She used to scold them and lock the door from outside to ensure they don’t escape,” a CBI officer says.
