Woman remanded in custody for blackmailing ex-boyfriend

A court on Thursday sent a woman to jail in judicial custody on the charges of blackmailing her ex-boyfriend with his nude pictures and videos.

The East district’s judicial magistrate ordered the Federal Investigation Agency’s investigation officer to submit a charge sheet against the accused within 14 days.

The complainant, Tahir Rasheed, had lodged a complaint with the FIA’s Cyber Crime Reporting Centre, saying that his former girlfriend, Sumera Ishaq, was circulating his obscene videos on Facebook through a fake account.

He said he had befriended Ishaq in 2013 and later in 2019 they had fallen in love and started seeing each other at their places. He said he had given her several gifts, including jewellery and clothes, during the relationship.

“We had developed intimacy and we would often do video calls on WhatsApp,” he told the FIA investigators. “She asked me to show myself [naked] on the chat and as I did she recorded me without me knowing.”

He added that after a few days she started demanding money and as he refused, she started blackmailing him with his nude videos and put them on Facebook through a fake account. “The woman blackmailed me after I refused her marriage proposal,” the complainant recorded his statement in the FIR

The IO, sub-inspector Komal Anwer, told the court that following the complaint a raid was conducted at the house of the accused and three phones were seized from her possession. The technical analysis of her mobile phones confirmed that these devices carried Rasheed’s obscene videos and the fake account that circulated them was also active in them.

The FIR is registered under Sections 16, 17, 20, 21, 24 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act read with Section 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code.

The FIA spokesperson said the evidence recovered from the woman’s cell phone and other material suggested that she was involved in similar acts of harassment and blackmailing in the past too. During a preliminary investigation, the spokesperson said they learnt that the arrested woman, a school teacher, was also involved in blackmailing a relative of the victim by capturing his obscene videos.