LUCKNOW: Five of a family in the Etah district of Uttar Pradesh were booked under UP anti-conversion law on late Friday evening.
The case was lodged against a 28-year-old Muslim man and his family, including three women, under the Jalesar police station area, on the charges of abduction and converting a 22-year-old woman who is the daughter of a businessman.
This is the ninth such case in the state the promulgation of Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance-2020 which came into being on November 28, this year.
In fact, as per the sources, the woman in question had gone missing on November 17. As per the sources close to her family, she adopted Islam on November 28, the day anti-conversion law promulgated in the state. However, the sources claimed that the conversion happened only after the woman had married the man, Mohammad Javed.
The police sources said that the family of the woman did not approach the local police to register any case in this connection till Thursday. They did so allegedly only after receiving a letter in this regard from a Delhi-based advocate about alleged conversion, said the police sources.
On the basis of the letter, her father, a shopkeeper, lodged a complaint alleging conversion and abduction of his daughter by the said family. Javed, the man whom the woman has allegedly married, is also a businessman and runs a cloth house.
He happens to be the neighbour of the woman. No one has been arrested in the case so far.
Jalesar Station House Officer Krishna Pal Singh confirmed that the FIR was lodged under IPC section 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing woman to compel her marriage, etc) and the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance.
Meanwhile, another case, the tenth in the series, was lodged in Shajahanpur, wherein, a 27-year-old man, his parents and three siblings were booked under the Sections of rape, extortion if IPC and 3/5 of UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion Ordinance-2020 also on Friday night.
The case was lodged against the entire family on the basis of a complaint filed by a 40-year-old woman who is the victim herself.
As per the FIR, the victim claimed that she was lured by the alleged perpetrator into a relationship with him. She claimed that he had introduced himself as Sunil instead of revealing his real identity while asking for accommodation on rent in a portion of her house.
She has said in her complaint that the culprit came close to her and after winning her confidence, he sought sexual favours from her but she refused to ask him first to marry her. Consequently, the culprit allegedly raped her at gunpoint and took her objectionable pictures.
Subsequently, the accused started blackmailing the woman, as per her claim, forcing her to continue the relationship with him.
The complainant claimed that after some days when she pressured the man to marry her else she would reveal his deeds, the man disclosed his real identity as Mohammad Sayeed, son of Mohammad Wali.
"Later, he forced me to convert to Islam to solemnise the Nikah with the help of his family and a cleric," she claimed in the complaint.
She further said that on resisting the man's move, she was raped by him yet again in the presence of her mother.
The Kotwali police station sources confirmed the registration of such a case under the sections of new anti-conversion law, and sections pertaining to and extortion of IPC. SHO Pravesh Singh said that the main accused was arrested and the questioning was on.