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TURA, July 10
Based on complaints made by three women, a driver of the Meghalaya police, Pabitra Koch, was arrested on Thursday by the Tura police after a FIR was filed by one of the three women, with the other two acting as witnesses. The three women had alleged that Koch had lied to them on various levels while continuing a physical relation with all three women, though he was married and had children with another woman.The victims are now all college based students living in and around the town of Tura. Koch himself is married with children, the eldest allegedly attending Class IX in a local school. The three victims of Koch were from Phulbari, Asanang in West Garo Hills (WGH) and Songsak in East Garo Hills (EGH).
“I met him in Phulbari when he introduced himself to me as Amit T Sangma in the year 2010. In time we fell in love and developed physical relations after he said that he was a bachelor and loved me and would marry me. I was only sixteen then and still knew him by the same name. He even showed me an ID showing himself as a gunman for an IPS officer but would not reveal the name of the officer,” said one of the victims who filed the FIR.
According to her, the relationship continued and even her parents were aware of this. “My parents knew about our relationship and thought that we would get married so did not raise any objection. They too did not know that his real name was something else. However there were many times that he would not pick up my calls which led me to suspect that he had other illicit relations or may even have been married as sometimes a woman would pick up my calls and answer in a different language,” added the victim.
The fraud was so extensive that the victims only came to know Koch’s real name on the day of filing the FIR after a photo of Koch was shown to one policeman from Tura.
“Three days ago he did the same thing and did not receive my call. We got into a heated argument when we met and I snatched his phone to find the names of other women that he had been calling regularly. I called those numbers and we were all shocked to find out that he had been cheating on all of us,” said the victim.
Another victim of Koch is a 19 year old girl from Songsak who only met him in 2014 when he introduced himself as Sanjay T Sangma, a bachelor LDA working in the Deputy Commissioner’s (DC’s) office at Ampati. With her too he got into an amorous relationship since they met.
The third victim is from the village of Asanang, about 20 kms from Tura who too met Koch in 2014 where he introduced himself as someone else and took advantage of her. He had introduced himself as a lab technician working in the medical department to her.
“Anytime we tried to break the relationship, he would threaten to kill himself but none of us were aware that this was what he was doing behind all our backs. We are not sure that we are the only ones”, said the second victim.
Koch is also alleged to have made a fake police identification card by the name of Amit T Sangma, a huge crime if proven and is also supposed to be handling more than 10 phones at a time.
A FIR was lodged on July 8 against Koch and he was later arrested the same evening.
“We are looking into the matter and investigation in the case is currently on”, said the Superintendent of Police (SP), WGH, Mukesh Singh.
