India’s national hockey captain Sardar Singh yesterday denied he sexually harassed a woman who claims she was emotionally abused by the player during their alleged relationship.
Police on Wednesday formed a special team to investigate the allegations lodged by the woman to a commissioner in Punjab, to determine whether to register a case against him.
Singh called a press conference yesterday to deny the claims including that he forced her to undergo an abortion last year after he called off their engagement.
Singh said he would co-operate with the investigators, but denied ever being in a romantic relationship with the woman.
“We met during the London Olympics. She came to my house... and we were good friends,” Singh told reporters.
Singh’s father Gurnam told reporters in Haryana’s Sirsa district on Wednesday that his son knew the woman but denied both were engaged.
The woman hails from Leeds and comes from a business family. She has alleged that she was “mentally, physically and emotionally tortured”.
The complainant is the first Sikh to play in Britain’s Under-19 women’s hockey team.
The woman claims Singh got engaged to her in 2014 and she became pregnant last year. She said he forced her to abort and began avoiding her thereafter.
The complainant said she met Singh in 2012 after becoming friends through a social networking site. She claimed they began living together after their engagement.
In the past, Singh had posted tweets and his photographs with the British woman.
Sources close to Singh defended him on Wednesday, saying that he had withdrawn from the relationship with the British hockey player after she started putting pressure on him to marry her and settle down in Britain.
They said that Singh, who remains busy in India due to his commitments with the national team and HIL, did not want to settle in Britain.
“She started blackmailing him through SMSes and phone calls to force him to settle in the UK,” a close aide of Singh said on Wednesday.
The midfielder also said that his social media accounts had been hacked with pictures posted of the pair together.
Singh yesterday also threatened to sue the woman, saying she used his social media accounts to post her side of the story without his consent.
“When I was playing in Spain she had access to my e-mails as earlier my friends used to use these,” Singh claimed.
“Some tweets that were attributed to me were also misused. She had also announced through Twitter that we will be getting married soon. At that time we were playing in Spain,” he said.
The 29-year-old was been a member of the national team since 2006 and helped India to win gold at the 2014 Asian Games and silver at the 2014 Commonwealth Games.