The victim, whose mother filed the complaint, said that only one of the suspects who attends weekend classes at her school was known to her and was part of her friends group on her private Instagram page.
According to the police, the friend who had access to the victim’s Instagram page was coaxed into extracting the girl’s image and sharing it with his friend – the class 9 student of DPS, Bangalore North – who in turn sent the image to Jeevan Kumar.
“It was Jeevan Kumar who created AI-generated nudes of the victims,” the police official said, adding that the morphed images were then sent back to the class 9 student who posted them on the Instagram group.
Meanwhile, the victim said that while she was happy that the culprits are being brought to book, she was upset with certain media for publishing lies to sensationalize the matter.
A leading national daily on May 29 published an article quoting an unnamed senior police official and wrote: “The regular class 9 student was the girl’s classmate. Though they were close initially, the girl was irritated by the boy’s advances later and tried to distance herself from him. Upset over the snub, the boy spoke to the student from the open school about it.”
The newspaper quoted the police official as saying: “The latter then told the former to provide a picture of the girl, which was shared with Jeevan, who was a friend of the boy from the open school. Jeevan morphed the photo and the nude images were then posted on social media by the girl’s classmate.”
“I never knew the class 9 student of my school, leave aside being close to him, since he is from a different section altogether. There was no interaction whatsoever. I knew the other guy, who now attends open classes, because he used to attend regular school till last year. But there was no closeness or bad blood as the newspaper report suggests,” the victim clarified, while adding that she had “no idea” why her friend shared her images with random strangers.