Chennai

Jan 4 2002

Digging deeper into the sleaze, unearthed with the arrest of Chennai-based orthopaedic surgeon Prakash on charges of creating and providing content for pornographic websites the Tamilnadu police are now gathering evidence on the suspected business partnership with a prominent woman social worker-cum-socialite of Pondicherry in the smutty operations.

Though the media is agog with stories about the doctor ' s activities in the city and his farmhouse in the suburbs ever since the news about his arrest broke in the last week of December, not much has come to open about the Pondicherry connection.

Investigations have revealed that a clandestine trade had been going on for the past two years with the social worker, in her early forties, supplying digitalised pornographic material to buyers abroad, mostly in France and USA. The woman, who runs a social organisation and a manpower consultancy was in cohorts with the doctor, now in the docks, in shooting pornography and exporting it.

Some floppies are said to have been seized by the police depicting bestiality and perverted sexual acts like adoloscents making love to older persons and group orgies. Since there is a great demand for such X-rated pictures and videos in Europe and USA, where shooting such scenes clandestinely is difficult despite many having a fetish for watching carnal pictures, the social worker is said have supplied the material and made loads of money in the process.

Apart from being regularly in touch with the doctor, who had even stayed in a posh hotel at Manakula Vinayagar Street in Pondicherry just a month before he landed in the police net, the social worker was closely linked with the doctor ' s brother living in the USA. Financial transactions between the doctor and the woman are said to have taken place in the hotel, where he is said to had been put up for about a week during his last visit.

The woman, posing as a social worker, had travelled to France and other Western countries several times and the Tamilnadu police are now collecting details about her trips from the French Consulate. Though the woman ' s links with the doctor were revealed within a few days of the doctor ' s arrest, the matter did not see the light in view of the political connections of the social worker, running a home for destitute women and reformed commericial sex workers.

Those women in the home are also said to have been employed in the racket. Besides police have identified half a dozen girls, working at a posh leather boutique on Mission Road, who are said to have posed for the pornographic pictures.

The shooting sessions are said to have been carried out in a bunglow on the East Coast Road between Pondicherry and Marakannam, indicating that much has happened in places other than the the Kattupalli farmhouse of the doctor, which has been visited by media teams and police in the process of unravelling the arrested doctor ' s past.

It is now suspected that thousands of videos and photographs have been exported to Europe and USA by the doctor and his associates, including the woman, who also conducts fashion shows and beauty contests and handles modelling assignments.

Police is also said to have seized some pictures showing the Pondicherry boy, Ganesan, whose complaint to the police that he was forced and threatened at gun-point to pose for pronography broke the sleazy racket, involved in group orgies. It now seems that the case has come full circle with the police landing in Pondicherry to wrap up the investigations started on the basis of a complaint by someone from Pondicherry.