It was a case to trump all detective stories and left the Bareilly police scratching their heads. A woman came in complaining that her aunt was gangraped and shot. But a day’s investigation left the police with a completely different picture – that of a cooked-up story. What astounded them was the length to which the alleged victim – Shamouli – could go to establish it. It needed a bullet, a coin, a quack and extensive imagination.
On the night of March 29, the Bareilly police received information about a woman being shot near Gandhi Udyan, said Manush Parikh, the city police chief.
The next day, her niece lodged a complaint, saying the woman was coming out of a medical store near a 300-bed hospital after making a purchase, when five men in a black car kidnapped her. She was later gang-raped, shot and thrown near Gandhi Udyan, she alleged.
It got the police force of the entire city to sit up and get busy with a manhunt – till the medical report came in.
The report made it clear that the bullet in the woman’s body was not the result of a firearm injury. It was inserted through an operation and the surgical scars were still there.
To confirm their growing suspicion, the police checked all the footage from roadside CCTVs. It turned out that woman was travelling in an auto-rickshaw at the time when she was supposed to have been kidnapped.
The police said during interrogation, the woman confessed that she had earlier blackmailed a public representative and his son. The case was in court and a judgment was expected soon. To avoid that, she had come up with this plan, which had this added advantage of trapping her adversary again.
The police said the woman got an employee of the district hospital and a quack from Sanjaynagar to insert the bullet. She then singed the area with a hot coin to mimic the powder burn from a bullet.
The police said at least three people were involved and the police are investigating the matter further.
Two of the accused have been arrested and are in custody. The possibility of more people being involved cannot be ruled out, the police said.