Bhubaneswar, Feb 15: A man married to 14 women in and around seven states within 48 years was arrested in Bhubaneswar, police said.
It is alleged that the sexagenarian who hails from a village under Patkura police station in Odisha’s Kendrapara district took money from these women before fleeing. The arrested man, however, denied all charges.
According to the Bhubaneswar Deputy Commissioner of Police Umashankar Dash, the accused had married for the first time in 1982 and took a second wife in 2002 and he fathered five children from these two marriages.
Between 2002 and 2020, he befriended other women through matrimonial sites and married them without knowledge of the other wives.
The man was staying in the capital city of Odisha with his last wife, who was a school teacher in Delhi. She somehow came to know of his earlier marriages and complained about the police. He was arrested from his rented accommodation.
Also Read: Delhi: 87-year-old woman alleges rape in Tilak Nagar, police are investigating
On the modus operandi of the accused, the DCP said he used to target middle-aged single women, mostly divorcees who sought companionship on matrimonial websites. Later he acquires their money before abandoning them.
He used to identify himself as a doctor and married lawyers, physicians and highly-educated women. A woman working in a para-military force was also among her victims, Dash said.
He has duped women in seven states including Delhi, Punjab, Assam, Jharkhand and Odisha. His first two wives were from Odisha.
The DCP said the matter came to the fore when the school teacher had complained about the Mahila police in July last year claiming that the accused married her in New Delhi in 2018 and took her to Bhubaneswar.
She came to know about his multiple marriages and the police arrested him based on her complaint.
Police seized 11 ATM cards, four Aaadhaar cards, and other documents from his possession. He was earlier arrested twice for cheating unemployed youths and loan fraud in Hyderabad and Ernakulam, police said.
