Srinagar, January 16: Chairman International Forum for Justice and Human Rights Ahsan Untoo is yet again in the middle of a sleazy controversy as another case of molestation and sexual exploitation against him has surfaced.
Untoo, who claims to be a human rights activist, is notorious for luring his victims by offering them financial or legal assistance and then exploiting them instead.
In a similar case, Police Station Rajbagh has lodged an FIR no. 10/2019 under sections 376 and 511 of RPC.
The complainant Rafiqa Bano, hailing from North Kashmir’s Bandipora district, is the widow of a militant commander who was killed in 1993 in a gunfight with the forces in which seven other militants lost their lives as well. Rafiqa was left with four small children and no source of income.
She kept doing small time jobs and managed to run the household until her children grew up and attained marriageable age.
In 2016, when she planned to marry off her eldest daughter, Rafiqa felt a need for some financial assistance and it was then that someone put her across to Ahsan Untoo who promised her financial help from his organisation and elsewhere. He took her to Yateem Trust Bemina where the management handed over a cheque of Rs. 20000/- to Untoo in her name.
Untoo asked her to accompany him to his office but instead too her to his rented house at Rajbagh. Untoo, pertinently, hails from Lolab valley of the frontier district Kupwara.
“When we reached there, I was a little startled because it didn’t look like an office and before I could ask anything, he quickly pulled down his pants and pinned me to the bed,” says a distraught and traumatized Rafiqa. “He almost overpowered me but Allah gave me the courage and I pushed him aside and ran out of the house.” In the middle of the chaos, she couldn’t even collect the cheque that Yateem Trust had written for her.
Rafiqa says she went to resistance leaders and complained against Untoo, but despite promising some action and knowing every dirty secret of the sex predator, the leadership couldn’t do anything. It was then that she decided to take legal recourse.
