UPDATED:
NRI female teacher
charged again raping a second male student
Full Story
New York, May 31, 2006
Associated Press
An Indian-origin female teacher and director at a
private school in Manhattan, who is already charged
with the statutory rape and sodomy of a male pupil,
has been indicted on similar charges involving a second
boy, a prosecutor has said.
Lina Sinha, 40, started having sexual relations with
the second pupil when he was 12, Assistant District
Attorney Florence Chapin said.
Sinha began sexual liaisons with the first boy, now
a New York police officer, when he was 13 and she
was 29, the prosecutor said, adding that the liaisons
lasted for years.
Chapin disclosed the case of the second boy during
a hearing in Manhattan's state Supreme Court in which
she told Justice Carol Berkman that Sinha was now
charged with 81 crimes. Chapin asked the judge to
set the teacher's bail at US$ 100,000.
Prosecutors have said that Sinha had family ties
in India and could possibly flee.
Chapin said Sinha, on administrative leave from the
school, began a sexual relationship with the first
pupil in June 1996, when he was a 13-year-old eighth-grader.
She was charged in October 2005 with raping him.
When he tried to end the affair in 2004, Chapin said,
Sinha tried to ruin his life "by making up heinous
allegations that he raped a young girl and then made
separate allegations that he also brutally assaulted
the defendant (Sinha)."
Sinha assumed another person's identity on at least
10 occasions in 2004-05 to file rape charges in person,
by telephone and by e-mail claiming the policeman
had raped her niece, the prosecutor said on Tuesday.
Investigators revealed that the person whose identity
Sinha had assumed did not have a niece, had never
reported any rape and did not know the victim or the
defendant, the prosecutor said.
Prosecutors said that Sinha could not be charged
with improper sexual contact with her former pupil
after he turned 17 as that was the age of consent
in New York.
Meanwhile, in January 2001, Sinha began a sexual
liaison with the second pupil, who was 12 and in the
seventh grade, Chapin said.
Besides rape and sodomy, Sinha is charged with criminal
impersonation, bribing a witness, tampering with physical
evidence, endangering the welfare of a child and falsely
reporting an incident. If convicted on the rape or
sodomy charges, she would face up to 25 years in prison.
