Well-known Indian man convicted of raping five Korean women in Australia

Balesh Dhankhar, an Indian-origin man and a well-known name among the Indian diaspora in Australia, has been found guilty of drugging and raping five women. A District Court jury in Sydney found him guilty of assaulting five Korean women and filming the acts on a hidden camera.

Sydney Morning Herald reported that a jury watched the traumatic videos and was so horrified that at one point requested to go home early.

Dhankhar, who has political ties, faced trial over 39 charges including 13 counts of rape committed between January and October 2018. A jury found him guilty of all the charges. The 43-year-old broke down in court after being pronounced guilty on all 39 charges.

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The jury, while hearing about the case, was briefed about how Dhankhar followed a "very specific modus operandi" to commit the crimes. He would lure women on the pretext of offering jobs for Korean translators. He would meet each of them at the same hotel, cafe and Korean restaurant before taking them to his studio apartment.

There he used to drug them with the sleeping drug Stilnox, also known as the date-rape drug Rohypnol. He added the drug to their drinks and after consuming them, the women fell unconscious. He then went on to assault them and recorded the act on a hidden camera in his alarm clock, and sometimes on his phone.

In a raid conducted at his apartment by the police in 2018, dozens of videos of him having sex with women were discovered. The videos were organised into folders and each of them carried the victim's name. Some of the women in the videos were unconscious and the videos were labelled with Korean women’s names.

According to records, Dhankhar was obsessed with Korean cinema, language, and women and was living out a disturbed fantasy through his gross act. His crime came out in the open when one of his victims woke up while he was assaulting her. She messaged friends about the situation from the bathroom. Dhankhar was later arrested on October 21, 2018.

Dhankhar pleaded not guilty, saying that all the women had consensual sex with him. He said that he lied to them because he was lonely after an extra-marital affair broke down. Dhankhar said that he was lonely due to the “unfulfilling” intimacy of his marriage.

(With inputs from agencies)

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