Miscreants targeted her with humiliating SMSes for over a year, forcing her to set herself ablaze 12 days ago; she died on Monday.
Persistent obscene text messages over the mobile phone, compounded by the indifferent approach of the Hubli-Dharwad police in taking stringent measures against the perpetrator, led to a 45-year-old woman taking her own life in Hubli.
The victim, Saloni Manikuntla, a resident of Mantur Road area in Hubli, set herself ablaze 12 days ago, succumbing to severe burn injuries on Monday.
The messages reportedly contained vulgar words about her and describing her husband, Richard Johnson, as helpless and useless. The police are in the dark over whether it was the handiwork of just one miscreant or a group. It was observed that the SMSes came from different numbers, indicating that either an individual was cleverly using different SIM cards to throw people off his track or it was a group with one and the same objective of humiliating Saloni and her husband.
One of Saloni’s relatives, named Wilson, said several people related to Saloni were receiving similar messages, and that the miscreant/s were careful enough never to answer the phone when any of the receivers tried calling to find out who was sending the messages. The miscreant/s only replied through SMSes and even boasted about the inability of the police to catch him/them.
Wilson told dna that the messages that Saloni received ridiculed her and her husband. He said the miscreants had been up to this menace for over a year. “When we filed a complaint with Bendigeri police station [the jurisdictional police], the SMSes only intensified; and shockingly, the miscreant/s even started sending similar messages to the police inspector.”
Expressing his helplessness, the police inspector, Syamaraj Sajjan, told dna that the caller may have been obtaining sim cards by providing fake documents. He said the miscreant/s kept switching off the mobile phone and were even changing the mobile phone handsets, which made it difficult to track the perpetrators using the IMEI numbers that help tracking the location of a particular mobile phone when in use.
On Monday, when the news of Saloni’s death was out, her relatives and friends attacked the Hubli Cooperative Hospital, where she had been admitted for treatment. They demanded immediate arrest of the perpetrators and even alleged that it was the police negligence that had caused Saloni’s death.
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