Serial stalker arrested for threatening girls

NEW DELHI: A mechanical engineer who had tormented hundreds of girls and women across the country with threatening and vulgar phone calls has been arrested here with six mobile phones and 25 SIM cards, police said on Saturday.

Vivek Kanwat, 30, working in a public sector undertaking in Bokaro as trainee engineer, was arrested Friday from northwest Delhi's Shalimar Bagh area after evading the police for months.   
 
Police said Kanwat was infatuated by girls and wanted to make many girl friends. After failing in his desperate efforts Kanwat decided to harass innocent girls.

Police said the six mobile phones found with him were stolen and the 25 SIM cards had been obtained on fake documents.

Police said Kanwat used to call girls and pressurize them to talk to him. He forced them to talk for long and even at odd hours. If a girl refused to talk he would threaten her with posting her profile on Orkut website as a call girl.

He even generated some obscene profiles of some girls.
 
Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Satyendra Garg said Kanwat had spent a substantial sum of money on such phone calls.

"With the arrest of the accused, thousands of girls and their parents in Delhi, Chennai, Gorkhpur and Bangalore have heaved a sigh of relief," Garg said. 

Explaining the modus operandi, Garg said Kanwat was a sharp and intelligent stalker. He used to steal mobile phone of girls thinking that through stolen phones he would be able to get numbers of several other girls. He was found in possession of more than 20,000 phone numbers of girls and women.

He would go on a morning walk in the Shalimar Bagh area and used to keep a strict watch over those who would leave home for buying milk or go for a walk leaving their doors open. After getting an opportunity, Kanwat would enter the house and take away mobile phones, purses or other valuable articles that could be concealed easily.

He had also obtained the phone numbers of some of the girls from Internet sites.

Garg said that from a study of the call records and patterns of the calls, it was revealed that Kanwat was using stolen phones and SIM cards made on stolen documents of a resident of Shalimar Bagh.

"The person whose identity was being used for making the calls was on the receiving end of the anger of victims and their parents because every call made to the girls was ultimately traced to him and he would face the enquiry time and again. It was affecting him mentally as well as socially because people would suspect him to be behind these stalking calls," Garg said.
 
"The calls were minutely studied and all connecting numbers verified. It was found that the origin of the calls was fluctuating from Bokaro and Delhi. The pattern was examined and it was concluded that the caller is a resident of Shalimar Bagh and visits Bokaro or vice versa," he added.

Garg said that after collection of intelligence inputs police zeroed in on Kanwat last month.