'Peepli' co-director gets 7 yrs jail for rape

NEW DELHI: A special fasttrack court sentenced Bollywood filmmaker Mahmood Farooqui on Thursday to seven years imprisonment for raping an American woman at his Sukhdev Vihar residence in March last year.

The court observed that the survivor, a 30-year-old research scholar of Columbia University , was a “truthful and credible witness“ and had no reason to falsely implicate the 44-year-old co-director of 'Peepli Live'.

Additional sessions judge Sanjiv Jain also imposed a fine of Rs 50,000 on Farooqui. Jain directed the Delhi State Legal Services Authority to adequately compensate the woman, observing that she had incurred expenses to return to India for lodging her complaint against the filmmaker and could not complete her research because of the incident.

Delhi Police and the woman had sought the maximum punishment of life imprisonment for Faroo qui, while the defence had pleaded for the minimum sentence of seven years in jail.

Besides her testimony, the court relied on the statement of Farooqui's old friend Danish Hussain, who had introduced him to the woman in Varanasi, where she had gone to study on Baba Gorakhnath.The court agreed with the prosecution's version that she had immediately shared her “ordeal“ with Hussain.

The mails Farooqui had exchanged with the woman and her conduct after the March 28 assault -she wanted to disassociate herself from him and leave his house immediately -also led to his conviction. The defence had chal lenged Hussain's testi mony and had said that the messages, which were sent immediately after the alleged assault while she was still at Farooqui's house, show her discussing “trivial things“ with Hussain and not even mentioning anything about the alleged assault.

The prosecution had said that Farooqui and even his wife Anusha Rizwi had apologised to the woman via emails. However, the defence had claimed that the mails showed impossibility of assault. Referring to the mail sent by the woman to Farooqui on March 30, two days after the alleged assault, the defence had said that even in this mail the woman had said that she was attracted to Farooqui.

One more significant reason which went against Farooqui was the testimony of prosecution witness Ashish Singh--who is a childhood friend of Farooqui and had come to Farooqui's house on the day of the incident. He had testified that though he went out of Farooqui's house for some time on the day of incident, he was there at the time cited by the woman as the time of incident. The court discredited Ashish's testimony and cited the testimony of a defence witness and Farooqui's friend Darain Shahidi to establish that Farooqui raped the woman at is house when he was alone with her. “It was when the prosecutrix was alone with the accused, Ashish was away from his house, it was confirmed that Darain was not coming to his house, the accused taking advantage of the situation raped the prosecutrix.“