Last Updated on: 28th October 2015, 02:28 pm
What’s better than sexually assaulting one woman on an airplane? Well, if you’re Saurabh Agarwal and the FBI is telling the truth, the answer is trying to sexually assault two women on an airplane.
In a sworn affidavit, FBI Agent David Wiegand reported that “R.C.L” was seated next to Agarwal on American Airlines Flight 1142, which departed Miami around 5:45 PM. After falling asleep following departure, the woman awoke to find Agarwal “hugging her body, with his hand inside her bra, fondling her breast.”
“Because of fear,” however, the woman “pretended to be asleep.” Wiegand noted that Agarwal “kept squeezing R.C.L.’s body tighter” and “squeezed her nipple.” The woman, who was in the window seat, told investigators that she “did not show that she was awake due to being scared of” Agarwal.
When a flight attendant approached with a refreshment cart, Agarwal “moved off the victim,” only to subsequently return to touching her as she continued to pretend to be sleeping. Agarwal, Wiegand charged, also leaned up against the woman and “pressed his legs up against R.C.L.’s legs.”
The woman then said that she “needed to use the restroom, left her seat, and went to the back of the Boeing 737-800, where she told the flight crew what had happened,” Agent Wiegand reported.
Much like our last case of in-flight molestation, there was a witness sitting next to them while everything was happening. Somehow that makes these stories seem even worse, doesn’t it? But unlike that case, it wasn’t the molester’s preteen son, at least. This one was a woman who initially assumed that Agarwal and the victim knew each other, but was still a bit creeped out and annoyed by the way he was acting toward her in public.
But then…oh then.
The witness said that after “R.C.L.” left their row, Agarwal touched her leg, claiming he had dropped his drink. The woman, Wiegan noted, “quickly jumped up and went to the back of the plane.” There, she “observed R.C.L. crying” and realized that “Defendant and R.C.L. did not know one another.”
The next people that Agarwal got up close and personal with were the on board federal air marshals, who detained him for the rest of the flight.
If convicted of the felony charges he now faces, he could be spending the next 2 years in prison getting to know some folks who will likely be quite a bit more receptive to his advances than the ones on the plane.
