Berhampur, Oct. 27: Police arrested a senior officer of a multi-national bank for allegedly raping a 24-year-old woman.
The accused, Aravinda Panda, 27, a resident of Tulsi Nagar, had held captive the victim in a hotel room for three days and allegedly raped her. The victim had worked under him for a few months. She left the bank after being harassed by Panda and was working with a Bangalore-based company since then.
Mahila police station of Berhampur, which is looking into the case, said the accused had made advances towards the girl. The girl, who is a postgraduate in commerce, used to avoid Panda. However, the accused used to harass her regularly. “Aravinda used to call the girl frequently to his cabin to woo her and develop intimacy with her,” inspector in charge of the Mahila police station Jyostna Kaunri said quoting the victim’s statement.
“Depressed, the girl left the bank job and went to work in Bangalore. However, Panda used to call her and send text messages to express his love for her. On October 18, the girl had come to Berhampur to visit her family. He saw her at a market place and proposed to marry her. He asked her to come with him to meet his parents. However, he took her to a hotel and confined her there for three days and allegedly raped her. Panda had threatened her not to disclose the incident to anyone,” a police official said. The police said that the girl, after getting out of the hotel, informed the incident to her parents and the police.
“The police arrested Aravinda on the basis of a written complaint on Sunday. We sent both of them to MKCG Medical College and Hospital for medical examination and produced the accused before the magistrate who forwarded him to judicial custody,” Kaunri said.
Drug arrest
Berhampur police have arrested Bhaskar Khatua alias Bulu, who gave biscuits containing drugs to Chandra Sekhar Panda, 35, at MKCG Medical College and Hospital, who died subsequently on September 14.
Bhaskar, a resident of Talapada at Tirtol in Jagatsinghpur district, was arrested from Bhubaneswar on October 26. “We arrested Bhaskar on our own initiative,” said Berhampur superintendent of police Sarthak Sarangi. Bhaskar along with his two associates managed to mix Lorazem tablets of Ativan group with cream biscuits and looted passengers in train earlier.
They moved to the towns and Chandra Sekhar was their latest victim in Berhampur.
