Indian cricketer Prithvi Shaw was allegedly manhandled and his car attacked with a baseball bat outside a hotel in Mumbai’s Santacruz after an argument with a woman social media influencer, Sapna Gill, and her male friend Shobhit Thakur after the batsman refused to click selfies with her. The incident took place in the early hours of Wednesday.
The Oshiwara Police has arrested Gill and booked seven others for allegedly trying to intimidate Shaw by damaging his car and threatening to implicate him in a false case.
Who is Sapna Gill?
Sapna Gill is a social media influencer and has over 2,20,000 followers on Instagram.
Gill has starred in such titles as Kashi Amarnath, Nirhua Chalal London, Mera Watan, Ravi Kishan and Dinesh Lal Yadav.
Gill hails from Chandigarh and is a resident of Mumbai.
Gill has her online presence on platforms such as the video-sharing app Josh, multimedia instant messaging app Snapchat and YouTube.
About the brawl
Police officials said Gill was called to the police station for inquiries on Thursday afternoon. After preliminary inquiries established her alleged involvement in the offence, she was placed under arrest.
However, Gill’s advocate has claimed that his client was a fan of Shaw and just wanted a selfie with him but the cricketer was drunk and misbehaved with her.
Gill’s lawyer accused Shaw of being drunk and alleged that the cricketer assaulted the influencer with a wooden bat in a “misuse of power and position”, while the police said that Gill and Thakur were in an inebriated condition at the time of the incident.
A video of the incident has gone viral on social media, which shows Shaw being manhandled.
A complaint in this connection was lodged by Shaw’s friend and flatmate Ashish Yadav, who runs a cafe. Yadav has been staying with Shaw at Bandra for the last three years.
As per the complaint, Thakur and Gill approached Shaw for a selfie at the hotel. Initially, the cricketer allowed them to do so. But they insisted on clicking more selfies with him, a demand that Shaw turned down.
After that, Gill and Thakur started arguing and misbehaving with the cricketer. The complaint said that both of them (Gill and Thakur) were in an inebriated condition. On seeing this, the manager of the hotel intervened and asked the duo, who were demanding selfies with Shaw, to vacate the premises.
After this incident, Shaw and Yadav had dinner at the hotel. But while they were stepping out of the place along with their friend, they saw Thakur holding a baseball bat in hand.
After they sat in their car, the accused attacked the windshield of the vehicle with the baseball bat. Shaw was also manhandled by Gill.
Sensing more trouble, the cricketer was shifted to another car while Yadav and others drove his vehicle to Oshiwara.
Yadav saw three motorcycles and a white-coloured car chasing their vehicle. Around 4am, those following him attacked his car when it was taking a U-turn near a petrol pump on Link Road.
Thakur, who was one of them, broke the rear windshield of the car with the baseball bat. The six persons on motorcycles along with Gill and Thakur, who were in the car, abused Yadav and those accompanying him. After that, Yadav took the car to Oshiwara police station.
The eight accused also followed them there. Gill started arguing and threatened Yadav to pay ₹50,000 to settle the matter or else she would lodge a false police complaint against them, the police official said. After that, Yadav lodged a complaint against the accused.
Based on his complaint, the Oshiwara police registered a case against the eight accused under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 143 (unlawful assembly), 148 (rioting), 384 (extortion), 506 (criminal intimidation) and others.
(With inputs from PTI)
