The September 2020 case of Ahmedabad’s Anand Niketan School wherein the school received an email to cancel the mid-Sept exams if they did not want nude photographs of female students to be circulated. Followed by this, the school cancelled the exams and approached cyber cell seeking an inquiry on the issue. The prime suspect of this case has now shifted to Dubai to help his billionaire father into his business.
The father of the suspect, who owns an event management company, crypto and Digi-wallet businesses, had confirmed that his entire family has shifted to Dubai and very soon he will be selling all his property in the city and will settle abroad.
The city police could not stop them from shifting as they still don’t have any solid evidence of the boy’s involvement in the case and no offence has been registered against him so far.
What was the case?
The school, located in the Satellite area of Ahmedabad, received the first mail on September 9, 2020, demanding the cancellation of mid-September exams to avoid the circulation of nude photographs of the school’s female students. The school, after this went to cybercrime police to inquire into the case and had also cancelled the exams. The cybercrime police initiated an inquiry into the matter on October 3, 2020.
The cybercrime police were struggling to figure out the suspect behind the mails since the inquiry was initiated. Two months later on December 6, 2020, the school received another mail demanding the cancellation of preliminary exams for Classes 10, 11 and 12. This is when the police got to know that the mails were sent by using the dark web and the case was one of the most complicated cybercrime cases in the city. Even the cybercrime police had even roped in the Central and American agencies for investigation.
Again, on March 31, the culprit joined a school meeting on Zoom using a virtual cell phone number and posted links to indecent and nude photographs of female students. This step gave the police a suspect. They found that the 17-year-old’s real motive was to defame particular two girls – one of them had rejected his advances and the other one for influencing her.
Later, the cops had also found a lead in the web searches on one of the devices they had gathered from 120 students and the police used a human intelligence track to find the lead. As the culprit had been using the dark web that leaves no evidence of the crime.
Apart from this, the school’s WhatsApp group received an indecent image of a student with a demand to cancel the first term exams of Class 12 after it was found hacked in August 2021.
The police after this incident had found that the prime suspect (who has now shifted to Dubai) was not the one behind the WhatsApp message. They had a strong suspicion of the culprit being guided by the prime suspect as the WhatsApp message was sent using the dark web.
