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Police Helpline Operator Laughs At Woman's Complaint Of Man Masturbating In Mumbai Local

"He found it funny."
A portrait of a woman is seen near the entrance of the female compartment of a suburban train at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus Railway Station in Mumbai November 2, 2012.
Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters
A portrait of a woman is seen near the entrance of the female compartment of a suburban train at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus Railway Station in Mumbai November 2, 2012.

A woman who complained to a police helpline that a man was masturbating at her while they were inside a local train in Mumbai has alleged that the women's helpline operator laughed at her and disconnected the call. The woman narrated the horrifying ordeal that reportedly took place on 24 May this year in a Facebook post last week that has gone viral since then.

"He found it funny," the woman wrote in her post, which has been shared over 300 times. She was describing her conversation with the helpline operator, after she had told him that a man was hurling sexually-explicit insults at her and masturbating and trying to touch her. She had told the operator that the train was approaching the next station, Kandivli. "I asked him whether they'd pick this person up at Kandivli. He cut the call."

In her description of the incident, the woman wrote that she was in the ladies' compartment of the local train in the afternoon when a man standing inside the handicapped compartment, separated from their compartment by a grill, tried to touch her as well as the woman sitting next to her. He then showed them his private parts and masturbating, calling them sexually-explicit names.

While the woman raised alarm, telling her co-passengers what he was doing, and tried to stop the man from deboarding at the next station, the man allegedly threatened her he would rape her. When she called the women's helpline from her co-passenger's phone and tried to complain, the operator laughed and reportedly disconnected the call.

Since the woman described the incident on Facebook, local police have reached out to her and are reportedly trying to trace the accused, whose photo was shared by the woman. They are also trying to find out who the operator was who received the woman's telephone complaint.

Read the full text of her post below.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.