A minor girl from West Bengal was allegedly drugged and gang raped by five youths in Odisha’s Balasore district, police said on Saturday.

Police said the youths allegedly took her with them after luring her on Friday night. After raping her, they dumped the girl on the roadside near Rasulpur village.

The girl was rescued by locals and has been admitted to a hospital.

After registering a case, police have launched a manhunt to nab the suspects.

As per reports, the girl hails from Ramnagar area in West Bengal, said police.

IANS

 Two elderly women were found dead in their apartment in Uttar Pradesh’s Allahabad city on Saturday, police said.

They were identified as sisters — Kusum, 73, and Rajrani, 75 — who had been living in the first-floor apartment along with their niece, Sadhna, on the ground floor.

It was the niece who alerted the police upon her discovery of the bodies after her call went unanswered by the aunts.

When she went up to check on them, she found the house ransacked, some items missing and the two lying dead on the bed. Both were strangulated, an official told IANS.

The double murder has caused panic in the Gujarati locality here.

IANS

 A shelter home in-charge has been arrested in Odisha’s Dhenkanal district for sexually exploiting girl inmates, police said on Saturday.

Simanchal Nayak, the caretaker of the non-government organisation-run Good News India Dream Centre in Beltikiri, was arrested following a raid on Friday by a joint team of Child Welfare Committee (CWC) and the District Child Protection Unit.

The inmates had accused Nayak of repeatedly sexually assaulting minor girls living at the centre.

The caretaker was arrested on the basis of a complaint lodged by Child Protection Officer (CPO) Anuradha Goswami, Dhenkanal sub-divisional police officer Sheikh Abdul Karim said.

Efforts were on to nab the owner and Managing Director of the home, Faiz Rahman.

The CWC team has found that the centre was established in violation of the Juvenile Justice Act.

IANS

 The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged music producer DJ Khaled and boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. with promoting investments in initial cryptocurrency coin offerings without revealing that they had been paid.

The stock market regulatory authority on Thursday said that cryptocurrency coins sold in initial coin offerings (ICO) may be considered securities and subject to federal securities laws, reports CNN.

Both Khaled and Mayweather settled with the SEC and agreed not to promote any securities, even digital ones, for two years and three years, respectively, it said.

They also agreed to give back the money they had received to the SEC and pay penalties with interest.

Mayweather failed to disclose that he had received $300,000 from three different ICO issuers, including $100,000 from Centra Tech.

Khaled failed to disclose a payment of $50,000 from the same company.

Centra has separately been charged by the SEC, which alleged that its ICO was fraudulent.

Both Mayweather and Khaled promoted Centra’s ICO on their social media accounts. Khaled called it a “game changer” while Mayweather encouraged his followers to get in on the ICO.

This is the first time the SEC has brought charges against individuals for promoting ICOs and the investigation was ongoing.

 A 78-year-old inmate sentenced to life behind bars for the murders of three women in the US, recently confessed to 90 homicides between 1970 and 2005, the FBI has said.

If confirmed, this number of murders would make Samuel Little one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, Efe reported on Thursday.

Little was arrested in September 2012 at a homeless shelter in Kentucky and extradited to California, where he was wanted for drug crimes.

Once in Los Angeles, authorities linked his DNA to that found in the murders of three women between 1987 and 1989. In all three cases, the victims were beaten, strangled and then their bodies dumped in an alley, a dumpster and a garage.

Little was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment for those three crimes, but police wanted to share his DNA and details of his modus operandi with the FBI so that a deeper investigation could be undertaken.

What the FBI found was an “alarming pattern and compelling links to many more murders,” mostly “marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs.”

“Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths uninvestigated,” the FBI statement added.

A lead on a case then took the FBI to Texas: “We found a case out of Odessa, Texas, that sounded very much like him, and we could place him passing through the area around the same time,” said ViCAP Crime Analyst Christina Palazzolo in the statement.

Accompanied by the Texas Rangers, the FBI decided to question Little last spring in a California prison, where he agreed to cooperate in exchange for a prison transfer.

“He went through city and state and gave Ranger Holland the number of people he killed in each place. Jackson, Mississippi – one; Cincinnati, Ohio – one; Phoenix, Arizona – three; Las Vegas, Nevada – one,” Palazzolo explained.

Little remembered his victims and the murders with great detail and he was even able to draw the faces of some of his victims.

In total, Little confessed to 90 murders over a 35-year period, with the killings being committed all over the country. Of those 90, 34 have already been confirmed.

IANS

 The Delhi High Court on Thursday extended former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s interim protection from arrest in the INX Media money laundering case till January 15.

The court was hearing Chidambaram’s anticipatory bail petition, seeking protection from arrest by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the case.

On July 25, the court had granted him interim protection, which was later extended to November 29.

The ED and the CBI are probing how Chidambaram’s son Karti managed to get clearance from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB).

Karti was arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media in 2007 when his father was the Union Finance Minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.

Later, Karti was granted bail.

Karti’s chartered accountant S. Bhaskararaman was arrested in the case by the ED and he too was later granted bail.

The Karnataka high court on Wednesday, November 28 directed the Cubbon Park police not to arrest actor Arjun Sarja till December 11.

Hearing the petition filed by Arjun Sarja seeking to quash the FIR registered against him on the basis of the sexual harassment complaint filed by actor actress Sruthi Hariharan, the High Court directed that there was no need to arrest Sarja till December 11.

Sarja in his petition alleged that the case and complaint was a classic case of austere abuse of law and launching of malicious and vile attacks on an innocent man who has thrived hard for 36 years to stand out with the portrait of a gentleman.

PTI

An elderly man was found murdered at his south Delhi residence on Wednesday, police said, adding that his absconding domestic help is the prime suspect.

The incident was reported to the police by the grandson of the deceased, identified as Chandrabhaan, 92. He was found murdered in Malorband area, Deputy Commissioner of Police Chinmoy Biswal said.

“Chandrabhaan stayed with his family on the ground floor. It was found that he was strangled to death,” Biswal said.

“The domestic help is at large. A hunt is on to nab him. The house was also ransacked,” the officer added.

IANS