Mumbai: He goes by many profiles — cult guru, psychiatrist, academician and what you will. He even has thousands of followers on the social media. To his critics, however, he is a fraud, child trafficker who lures young girls and boys into sex and drug racket with his charm and glib talk. But on Wednesday night luck ran out and Sunil Kulkarni was arrested by the crime branch of Mumbai police from Malad. The Delhi-based charmer was produced before the metropolitan magistrate’s court on Thursday afternoon.
Deputy Commissioner of Police of Mumbai crime branch Vinay Kumar Rathod told media, “The FIR was registered at Malad police station and Kulkarni was arrested just after midnight from south Mumbai.”
The court sent Kulkarni to police custody till April 28. He has been charged under Sections 292 (carrying obscene objects), 328 (causing hurt by means of poison), 370 (trafficking of persons for the purpose of exploitation) and 420 (cheating) of Indian Penal Code. The cops also slapped several sections of the Information Technology Act on Kulkarni on the direction of the Bombay High Court.
This is not the first time that Kulkarni has been sent behind bars. He was arrested earlier in Delhi under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
The present arrest pertains to a petition filed before the Bombay High Court in which a Malad-based chartered accountant Sandip Sule, who alleged that his daughters — Shivangi Sule (23) and Samira Sule (21) — were lured into a racket by Kulkarni and that the police wasn’t registering an FIR. The two girls have been missing for some time.
On Thursday, the public prosecutor representing the crime branch told the court that crucial evidence in the form of pen drives have been retrieved from Kulkarni.
“It is suspected that the Sunil Kulkarni had given the victims ( girls) anti-depression medicines and he knows the art of hypnotism by which he influences young girls and boys.”
Kulkarni told that the magistrate that he would represent himself. “The (Sule) girls should be brought into the investigation,” he said.
The Sule sisters — in hiding now — however have a different story to tell.
Talking exclusively to a Mumbai based Media house from her hideout somewhere in Mumbai, Shivangi Sule told them , “All the allegations levelled against Sunil Kulkarni by our parents are incorrect and baseless. My parents have just used the background of Kulkarni to hide their own acts of violence against each other,” adding, “Kulkarni was the visiting faculty in my college and I met him there through a common friend and now I am working with him.”
The Sule sisters claimed that they had even written to DCP (Zone XI) Vikram Deshmane on March 2. “Our parents have hired goons and influenced a political party to make life hell for us,”, Shivangi said.
