Just days after a Swiss woman told police she was gang-raped while camping with her husband in central India, Indian officials say there’s been another unpleasant episode involving a foreign woman traveler.
A British woman says she jumped from the balcony of her hotel room in the northern city of Agra on Tuesday morning to escape sexual harassment, according to local police.
According to the woman’s statement, which a police officer read out to India Real Time, at around 3:45 a.m., Sachin Chauhan, the manager of Hotel Agra Mahal, turned up at the door of the room where the 31-year-old woman was staying to ask if she wanted a free head massage.
The woman said she opened the door and asked him to leave. After he insisted, according to her statement the woman pushed him out of the room and bolted the door.
The woman says he returned at 4:30 a.m., and tried to open the door of her room. The woman told police she also heard another man’s voice outside the room and panicked. To escape the men, she told police she jumped out of the window of her first-floor room onto the street.
According to her statement, a man helped her get a rickshaw to the police station, where she filed a first information report against the hotel manager.
Police say the British woman tore a ligament in her ankle in her fall. She has been moved to another hotel and has been given police protection. She had been in Agra since March 17.
Mr. Chauhan could not be reached for comment. He has been arrested on charges of sexual harassment, says Pawan Kumar, Agra’s superintendent of police. Police says Mr. Chauhan denies sexual harassment, and that he says he was only trying to wake up the woman because she was meant to leave the hotel early Tuesday morning.
Hotel Agra Mahal is now shut, according Naresh Kriplani, a friend and neighbor of Mr. Chauhan, who picked up the hotel’s phone when India Real Time called Tuesday. “I’m just helping out while he’s with the police,” said Mr. Kriplani, who declined further comment.
On its website, the three-star hotel is described as a place where guests can experience “traditional Indian culture and hospitality.” It mentions that the hotel is just a five-minute drive from Taj Mahal, India’s most-famous tourist site.
The British High Commission in New Delhi is in touch with police in Agra as well as with the victim, according to a spokeswoman for the high commission.