Bengaluru: Despite repeated complaints from dozens of young female students in Maharani Women's College of being preyed on by sexual predators who had a free run of the campus and their hostel after dark, neither the college authorities nor the police acted.

It took a Deccan Chronicle expose and a visit prompted by the story to the college premises by the MLC, Mr. V.S. Ugrappa, who heads an Expert Committee on Preventing Sexual Violence against Women and Children for the sickening, episodic perversion that was allowed to be conducted unhindered, to come to light.

The college, founded by the Mysore kings and functioning for almost 80 years, is located in the heart of the city but has left its students unsafe and vulnerable to random men entering their hostel premises at will.

On Monday when the Expert Committee led by Mr Ugrappa checked the CCTV footage of the girls' hostel at the college, they found to their utter shock a half-naked man wearing women's undergarments walking inside the hostel compound with a knife in his hand.

Students alleged that though they filed complaints several times on such predators entering the hostel, the police had not taken any action so far. They had even seen strangers entering the hostel with lethal weapons, the students disclosed.

Though local police and college authorities deny that anything of this sort has happened at the hostel, the CCTV footage is enough to prove that the students are speaking the truth. I

t shows the half-naked man entering the hostel around midnight and stealing students' undergarments while trying to scare them with a knife. But the brave students called the security guards and succeeded in chasing him out of the campus.

The students have complained to Mr Ugrappa that the menace posed by the predators has increased over the last one month. "I have directed City Police Commissioner Praveen Sood to investigate the matter," he said.