Fitness trainer alleges that a model's ex-flame misrepresented him by sending abusive messages to politicians

Love, SMS and dhokha

Fitness trainer alleges that a model's ex-flame misrepresented him by sending abusive messages to politicians

Was a messy love-hate saga the reason behind several top politicians receiving abusive messages in the recent past? The Delhi police seems to believe so. Manik Verma, a model-turned-fitness trainer at the Constitutional Club, shared with MiD DAY the harassment he had to face because of his alleged proximity to the suspect's girlfriend.

"It was two months ago when Pooja, who is said to be the girlfriend of the accused, met me at a party where she showed interest in entering the glamour world. I promised that I would help her through some contacts but I never thought that I would land in such a soup," Verma lamented.

"On April 14, I started getting calls from the Delhi police saying that I had sent abusive SMSes to certain VIPs. I was shocked because I had done no such thing. Even then, I was detained and was taken to the police station. Initially I could not understand why the police were after me, but they were cooperative and hinted that my personal details and documents had been misused. For a while I thought my career was ruined as I had been dragged into a police case," added Verma.

Manik Verma was lucky. He was let off and the main culprit was nabbed by the Delhi police. "The cops told me that the accused Narendra Khosla was seeking revenge as his girlfriend had been calling me. We never had an affair; our relationship was completely professional. But Khosla planned to frame me; so he took my picture from a website and with forged documents he got a mobile connection in my name. He started sending threat messages to politicians including Shashi Tharoor and claimed to be acting on behalf of Dawood Ibrahim's gang and warned Tharoor to apologise to Lalit Modi or prepare to die," Verma said.

Khosla was arrested on Friday and three mobile phones and fake IDs were recovered from him.
"On interrogation, Khosla revealed that he had a long affair with a girl whom he wanted to marry but couldn't as his family was against it. He married another woman. But his former girlfriend started an affair with Manik Verma," said a police source.

"When Khosla came to know about this, he became very jealous and decided to frame Manik. He gathered Manik's personal details from different sources, including the Internet, prepared a fake driving license with the help of one of his employees Rohit Kumar and procured a SIM card. He used this card to make an extortion call to a Faridabad-based jeweller and asked him to pay Rs. 5 lakh," a police officer said.

"He got another SIM card under Manik's name and used it to send threatening and lewd SMSes to several prominent politicians and MPs," the officer added. Nearly 100 abusive messages had been received by politicians, including Shashi Tharoor, CPI (M) leader Brinda Karat and Congress leaders Rashid Alvi and Sandeep Dikshit in the last fortnight.

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