A 27-year-old engineer was held captive and sexually assaulted for two-and-a-half months by Andheri resident Sayyed Amir Hussain, Times of India has reported. The accused also tonsured the victim’s head after she refused to marry him.

While concealing the identity of the accused, the Hindustan Times report on this shocking crime tells us that Hussain physically and mentally tortured the woman to change her religion – forcing her to watch videos of controversial Islamic evangelists and beating her if she did not follow the verses.

The woman had shifted from Goa to Mumbai recently and met Hussain on a dating/social networking site. He invited her to his apartment on June 15 to celebrate the festival of Bakra-Eid, and sedated the woman by offering her a sweet dish laced with drugs. Then he raped her and shot nude photos and videos.

“When she visited Hussain’s home, he offered a sweet laced with some drugs, and sexually assaulted her. When she regained consciousness, Hussain showed her mobile phone videos of him sexually assaulting her and started to blackmail her. Initially, he kept her confined to his home till June 30, during which he repeatedly raped her and also beat her with leather belt. He took away her debit card and withdrew Rs. 40,000 from her account,” said an officer from Oshiwara police station in Mumbai.

In her complaint, the woman said that Hussain let her off on June 30. “However, he kept following me. On July 3, he called me and told me to reach his home else he would circulate the video of sexual assault on social media. He forced me to return to his home on July 3,” she said in her complaint.

According to police, Hussain asked her to marry him, but she refused. “The woman said that he would tie her up and gag her with a cloth and sexually assault her. He also threatened to sell her for flesh trade if she did not marry him. He tonsured her later,” a police officer said. According to the police, Hussain told her that he had targeted two other women similarly in the past.

Hussain also told the woman that he had two passports, including a Pakistani passport, and showed her a photo of a man seated on a chair surrounded by weapons such as bombs, police said. He even made the woman write suicide notes and took her signatures on blank papers.

On August 25, the woman finally managed to escape to a relative’s house in Pune last week and lodged an FIR on September 1 at Kothrud police station in Pune, after which the accused, Sayyed Amir Hussain alias Seroj Khan (27), was arrested from his Milat Nagar flat in Andheri (West) – considered one of the poshest areas of Mumbai – on Monday.

He was produced before the Andheri metropolitan court, which remanded him in police custody till September 10. Police are trying to recover the chemical used to spike the sweet given to her, besides the mobile phone in which the accused allegedly recorded the sexual assaults.

Hussain has been booked for rape (IPC section 376 ), unnatural sex/offences (section 377 ), wrongful confinement (sections 342 and 344 ), outraging modesty (354), robbery (392 ), criminal intimidation (506) and also under the IT Act.

Did you find this article useful? We’re a non-profit. Make a donation and help pay for our journalism.