Assam teacher held after photos of him groping student go viral

“The man has admitted to the act, and said that he had himself asked another girl of the same class to take several photographs where he was holding the victim girl in various positions. Faizuddin Laskar also admitted that while he had proposed to marry the girl, her parents fixed her marriage with another person. Following that he had tried to use the photographs to break that marriage by engaging another man to show the photographs to the groom’s parents, but the other person apparently did not do so,” SP Goswami told The Indian Express.

The girl, who had taken her Class X board exams earlier this year, meanwhile has been married off with her parents claiming she was 18 years old when her marriage took place, the SP said. “Her parents claimed she was already 18 when she was married off. While we are still trying to find out her age records, it is clear that she was a child when she was sexually abused by the teacher,” SP Goswami said. “The photographs were taken about 8 to 10 months ago, but appeared in the social media in the past one week,” he said.

The police meanwhile are on the look-out for several other persons including the person whom Faizuddin Laskar had engaged to show the photographs to the girl’s in-laws even as her marriage was being fixed. “We have yet to locate the person whom Laskar had given the photographs to show to the girl’s would-be in-laws when her marriage was fixed a few months ago,” the SP said. The police are also in the process of identifying the person who had first uploaded it on social media following which it had gone viral.

“It is a very serious matter. While we took the matter to the Assam State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, the police had already registered a suo moto case on seeing the visuals going viral on social media. What is worse, many supposedly educated people have also indulged in re-circulating the photographs by forwarding them through different social media. We have requested the cyber crime wing in the Assam Police CID to take cognizance of this too,” Miguel Das Queah, who heads an NGO called UTSAH that works for child rights protection, said.