India: six convicted in the 1992 Ajmer dargah blackmail-rape case — 32 years on

Proceedings

1. 2024-08-20 · conviction and life sentences (final tranche of a decades-long prosecution)

   Special POCSO court, Ajmer, Rajasthan, India. On 20 August 2024, thirty-two years after the offences, a special POCSO court convicted six men — Nafees Chishti, Naseem alias Tarzan, Salim Chishti, Iqbal Bhati, Sohail Ghani and Syed Zameer Hussain — and sentenced each to life imprisonment with ₹5 lakh fines, for the 1989–92 Ajmer scheme in which men including hereditary khadims of the Ajmer Sharif Dargah lured, gang-raped and photographed schoolgirls aged roughly eleven to twenty, using the photographs to blackmail victims into repeated compliance. Earlier tranches of the case produced other convictions across three decades; about six victims are reported to have taken their own lives.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• social and religious standing of hereditary shrine custodians
• photographic blackmail compelling repeated compliance and recruitment of further victims