Dance instructor in police net for sexually abusing students

Ballari: The Toranagallu police arrested a dance instructor on charges of sexually assaulting and abusing his minor students and sent to judicial custody.
Hanumesh, 32, alias Babu Madhusudhan Teja, chief of The Smart Steps Dance Academy, is a resident of Shivapura village in Koppal district. On receiving a tipoff, police raided his academy at Kudutini village on Sunday, when he was busy with a class.On interrogation, he confessed to all the crimes, and disclosed the names of his aides, who helped him in his criminal activities.
Police said the accused had a strategy to trap girls. He would select minor girls for dance classes, and later call their parents to tell them their wards were talented and had the potential to become great dancers.
After several classes, he would start molesting the girls, and record images of the girls on his mobile. He used these images later to blackmail them. If anyone raised their voice against Hanumesh, he would close the academy overnight, change his contact number and address and vanish, and resurface in another place, under a new name. His three aides, Prahlad, Habeeb and Krishna, were taken into custody. Police also seized a mobile, memory card, pen drive, OTG cable and several tablets.
Hanumesh, who had completed PU and was a computer science diploma dropout, had opened several branches of the dance academy in Ballari, Koppal and other districts of Karnataka. He posed as a great dancer, and put up flex boards, banners and advertisements about himself and his dance academy.
He had started a branch at Toranagallu town in Sandur taluk, where he had kidnapped a minor girl student, and sent her home after several days. After several days, he allegedly released several morphed photographs of the girl, who had filed a complaint at a local police station.
Two complaints were registered against the accused in Ballari city limits too -- one at Gandhinagar police station, where a student filed a complaint of sexual harassment and atrocity, and another at Brucepet police station for taking the earrings of a student. Police suspect that similar complaints were registered against him at several police stations across the state. Ballari SP R Chetha said, "Police arrested dance instructor Hanumesh on Sunday. A detailed study of the case and Investigation is going on, and if any fresh cases are filed against him, they will also be considered as part of the probe."