Bengaluru home guard arrested for extorting money from tourist

(News Agency) A home guard deployed by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly extorting from a woman tourist. The arrested guard, identified as Manjunath Reddy, allegedly fined the woman tourist Rs 1,000 for "sitting without permission" at Bengaluru's Kundanahalli Lake.

The case came to light after the woman, Arsha Latif, narrated the incident on Monday in a now deleted post on Twitter. She said she was sitting at Kundanahalli Lake with her male friend when Manjunath Reddy took a picture of them and started "harassing" them, saying they did not have permission to sit there.The woman claimed Manjunath Reddy started interrogating what the two of them were doing at the lake. He then "insinuated that he will take us to the police station and his senior will deal with us, but it's best to settle the matter here because he speaks a little Hindi but his senior only speaks Kannada." He asked the woman and her friend to pay him Rs 1,000 as a fine and let him go. In an update to the tweet, the woman said the Bengaluru Police informed her that Manjunath Reddy had been arrested and he was impersonating the police to extort money.