TN: Women filmed with spycams in bedrooms

Madurai: Spy cameras discreetly planted inside bedrooms and bathrooms of several homes by five perverted neighbourhood men has left an entire village near Samayanallur in Madurai district in shame and fear of a ‘sex scandal’ waiting to explode. Two victims, both teenaged girls, have already attempted suicide over the “loss of honour.” The other women are living in fear that videos showing them in an explicit state would surface anytime or must have already been seen by people online.

Police has so far arrested four persons and a hunt is on for another accused. But all of them have been booked merely for eve-teasing because the affected women were embarrassed to lodge complaints about being filmed in the nude. However, village elders have ostracized three of those arrested Ejaman (19), Ranjith (19) and Chinnasamy (26), who belong to a tribal group. The wife of the main accused Ayyankaalai (37) has left him and his brother Ramachandran is absconding.

Express is withholding the name of the village on a request from some of its inhabitants as they apprehend that it could cast an indelible slur on their reputation. The scandal came to light when villagers spotted a man watching porn on a mobile phone and recognised the girl as a local. On being grilled he spilt the beans. He told the villagers that he and four others had planted spy cameras in several homes on the pretext of repairing electrical lines or during a casual chat.

“We are all in a state of rude shock. All of them were known to us and they would frequent our house. We had no reasons to suspect them. But they were such perverts that they even placed the cameras in the houses of their relatives. One of them has even filmed his wife in the nude without her knowledge,” said a woman pleading anonymity.

Madurai SP, S Balakrishnan told Express that on learning about the scandal, police had urged the villagers to file a complaint. “They refused out of shame. One woman finally came forward and filed an eve-teasing complaint. We have now booked the four persons under Section 4 of the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Women Harassment Act,” he said.

“The four have confessed to their crime. We have seized their phones and laptops and sent them to the cyber crime wing for examination,” Balakrishnan added. Police are tracking their phone records to see if they had sent multimedia messages (MMS) of the porn clips. “If this is proved, we will soon book them under the Information Technology Act,” he further said.