A social media post detailing an incident of alleged police harassment and demand for a bribe in Bengaluru has been making the rounds. The post was originally made on the discussion platform Reddit and was reposted to Twitter on Tuesday.
The post, titled ‘Paid 1L to Bangalore police to let us go’, narrates the experience of an unidentified individual who was taken to a police station from the city’s Indiranagar area for using an e-cigarette, which is banned in the country.
The user accused Bengaluru cops of demanding a ₹1-lakh bribe and threatening to put them in jail for a year. The user and his friends then ended up paying the entire amount in cash, he said.
Read the post here:
The user also added: “I’m not looking for solution here to get my money back. I have already talked and discussed in detail to 3-4 criminal lawyers about this right after the incident , and I know there’s almost nil chance of seeing the money back. I just wanted to share my experience here.”
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“It was hell of a scary situation, and not knowing the local language makes it worse too. But yes, need to keep a criminal lawyer on the speed dial if living in Bangalore lol. Also basic rights were out the window since we were not even allowed to make a phone call. Not allowed to even sit,” he continued in a reply to a comment.
The post, reshared on twitter, also garnered a horde of responses.
One social media, the user narrated their own experience.
“Since the IO had demanded a bribe and made efforts to reach us thru his personal email id, we had saved the evidence we had provided. The IO who was promoted as PI was issued a notice to come back and look for them. If not for the evidence we saved they’d have walked away that our samples were never taken. WA conversations came in handy,” a second tweet read.
Top cops Pratap Reddy, Praveen Sood and Alok Kumar did not respond to repeated requests for comment by Hindustan Times.
