Washington: In a shocking incident, a 34-year-old Indian was arrested in the US for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman passenger who was seated next to him on a flight. When Celia (name changed) fell asleep on board the Spirit Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Detroit on 3 January, she could not have imagined the horror she would wake up to.
The 22-year-old was on the window seat, while Prabhu Ramamoorthy, an Indian national living in the US, was on the middle seat with his wife on the aisle seat. When Celia woke up, she allegedly found her shirt and pants unbuttoned, and Prabhu’s hands inside her pants. Prabhu apparently stopped touching her when she woke up and opened her eyes. The distraught and shocked woman then approached the flight attendants in tears and informed them about the sexual assault.
Prabhu was arrested when the plane landed. After appearing before the federal court in Michigan, he was held without bail. According to court documents, two flight attendants confirmed that Celia had come to them in tears with her shirt and pants undone.
According to a written statement by Prabhu, he had taken a pill (“plain Tylenol”) and fallen into deep sleep. He claimed that he had done nothing to his co-passenger, but that his wife had told him that Celia was sleeping on his knees. Prabhu’s wife, meanwhile, told a similar sequence of events and said that they had called the flight attendants to change their seats as well. However, the flight attendants denied the same. Prabhu also apparently gave conflicting testimonies about what happened with the victim.
Prabhu’s lawyer, Richard O'Neill, offered to submit his client’s passport, and said that there had been no prior allegations of such nature against Prabhu and that he had a clean record. According to another report, Prabhu initially said that he did not know where he had placed his hands in his sleep.
But apparently he changed his statement later and said that he may have unclasped the victim’s bra while she was asleep and placed his hands over her breasts. The report also says that Prabhu admitted to unzipping Celia’s pants and putting his fingers inside.
