Rs 2 lakh bounty for info on Manipal rapist

The campaign against the accused in the Manipal rape incident has finally gathered some momentum. Students, activists, social leaders and to some extent political pressure has upped the ante against the accused rapists. For the first time ever since Udupi became an independent district in 1997, the district police have announced a reward for turning in a culprit. After releasing the sketch of the main accused on Monday, the police announced a reward of Rs 2 lakh for turning him in.

Incidentally, the police took six persons, who resembled the visage in the sketch, into custody and later released them after they were found to be innocent. They also scoured over 700 autorickshaw drivers for identification and in the next three days, all the 3000 rickshaws in the district will be checked, said the inspector general of police (Western Range) Pratap Reddy.

“We received a total of seven calls from people stating that they saw a person resembling the face shown in the sketch released by us. Five of these calls were from Udupi and Manipal and two calls were from Kerala. We also interrogated a total of 47 persons whom we considered could yield valuable information in the case,” Reddy said.

The police have identified a particular autorickshaw from the CCTV footage from the location of the library, but its number and other features were not clear. “We are enhancing the footage to establish the registration number,” he said.

The police as said that the victim was not cooperating with the police, which has become a stumbling block in further investigations.

Snap protests by auto unions
The autorickshaw drivers and their owners refrained from working for more than two hours on Tuesday, alleging harassment from the police. They marched to the Manipal police station from Tiger Circle and met the police inspector Sadananda Thippannavar. In the memorandum given to him, the drivers and owners appealed the police not to hamper their work by calling them frequently to the police stations to elicit information from them.

“We will cooperate with the police to get the culprit, but let them not harass us by calling us to the police stations in the night time,” said Raghavendra Suresh, leader of the auto Union in Udupi.

A source in the close circle of the activists told dna on conditions of anonymity that there was a possibility that political pressure might derail the investigations, leading the victim to shun away from filing an official complaint. The present complaint has been filed by the estate manager of the Manipal University.