Lucknow: A Spanish tourist whose wallet got picked while on a visit to Varanasi's Kashi Vishwanath temple has accused police of making her write a complaint of theft by an unidentified person, brushing aside requests to first quiz the constables who frisked her.

Suresh Chandra Rawat, superintendent of police, crime, however, said, Josepha Frandez's claims that she lost her wallet during the security check were baseless.

Josepha, 55, a tourist from Barcelona, was in the temple town with seven family members and had gone to visit the Kashi Vishwanath shrine on Monday.

"We went to the temple at 8:30am. I noticed after manual frisking by security personnel at Gate No. 2 near Saraswati Fatak that someone had stolen a wallet in which I had kept Rs 4,400 in cash," she told reporters.

"The police rejected my request to ask the constables at the security checkpoint about my money and registered a case against an unidentified thief after six hours."

Monday's incident was the third time in less than two months that a foreign tourist had been targeted in Varanasi, the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A Japanese tourist was robbed by motorbike-borne thieves in late December, weeks after an Argentine was molested and robbed of her cash near the Ganga's banks.

Rawat said the Spanish tourist had three pen drives in a small wallet kept in a handbag. "The women security personnel asked her to keep the pen drives outside. She went to a nearby shop to keep it but returned immediately and declared that her small wallet was missing."

Visitors keep items banned inside the temple, such as cameras, pen drives and pens, in lockers provided by shopkeepers near the shrine.

"We took her to the spot to find out how it happened and also viewed CCTV footage. Later, we registered a case and are trying to identify the thief," Rawat said, adding that there isn't any closed-circuit cameras at the checkpoint for women for reasons of privacy.

"But we noticed in footage from a CCTV placed a little away that a security official asked the tourist without opening the wallet what was inside and then suggest she keep it somewhere else and then return to enter the temple premises," Rawat said.

So the tourist's doubt that her cash was stolen during the security check is baseless, the officer added.

Josepha said the amount she lost was not important. "But the police kept taking me from one place to the other in the name of searching for the thief. Who would like to visit Varanasi if this is the situation?" she said, adding that she would register a complaint with the Spanish embassy.