Ahmedabad serial molester given 1.5-year head start

AHMEDABAD: If you spit on the road or break traffic rules, you will get an e-challan from the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) or traffic police. But the serial molester from Thaltej preyed on teenage schoolgirls for one-and-a-half years, and not even one of the 6,000 CCTV cameras of the so-called 'Smart City' Ahmedabad captured him clearly.
Moreover, the lackadaisical approach of the city police gave a free run to the serial molester, Parshva Shah, against whom at least two FIRs have been filed by the parents of two teenage girls.However, the question remains why police did not act in January last year when the first victim's parents submitted an application to nab the accused.
After the second attack was reported widely, the father of the first victim, a16-year-old, approached the Sola High Court police again and lodged a complaint.
D H Gadhvi was the second police inspector at the station when the first victim's father filed the application. "We did not receive any complaint in January last year," Gadhvi said.
However, the first victim's father, who had also submitted CCTV footage to police, said that he had filed the application to register an FIR in January 2018. Eventually, his FIR was registered this Thursday. On January 29, 2018, when the complainant's daughter was waiting for her school bus, Shah had allegedly molested her. As he fled, he looked back at the girl and smiled. This complainant himself had hunted for footage from CCTVs installed in housing societies in Thaltej.
"I found some footage but the molester's face was not clear and his bike's numberplate was blank," the complainant told TOI.
The serial molester's crimes came to light after a Thaltej resident filed an FIR on Tuesday stating that his 17-year-old niece, who was out on a morning walk, had been molested. Police on Wednesday arrested Shah, the father of two children who runs a garage on Ashram Road.