Excel sheets, fake jobs: How Indian-origin man planned ‘elaborate’ rapes in Australia

Balesh Dhankhar, an Indian community leader in Australia was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Friday for raping five Korean women, a crime that the judge described as ‘premeditated and elaborately executed’.All the women, aged between 21 and 27, were either unconscious or significantly impaired at the time of the abuse.

According to a report by the Australian Associated Press, Dhankhar posted fake job advertisements to lure women before drugging them in or near his home in Sydney.

The former IT consultant then groped and raped the women.The convict kept a sickening Excel spreadsheet in which he rated each applicant of his fake job advertisement based on looks and intelligence, the report said.The spreadsheet also recorded his interactions with each victim, their details, and his assessment of their vulnerability and suitability for his plans.

He also filmed his crimes for his future sexual gratification.A jury in 2023 found him guilty of 39 offences, including 13 counts of sexual assault after he was arrested in 2018.The 43-year-old has also been handed a non-parole period of 30 years out of the four-decade-long imprisonment.

During the sentencing, he sat in the docks and showed no emotion.Dhankhar denies drugging the women or that sex was non-consensual, telling a report writer there was a "difference in how I interpret consent, to how the law sees consent".The convict’s non-parole period expires in April 2053, backdated to the end of his trial.

He will be aged 83 when his full sentence of 40 years ends.What did the judge say about Balesh Dhankar while sentencing him to 40 years in prison?While jailing Balesh Dhankhar for 40 years for raping the five Korean women, district court judge Michael King said the offender's conduct was "premeditated, elaborately executed, manipulative and highly predatory" and demonstrated his desire for sexual gratification came in complete and callous disregard for each victim."This was an egregious sequence of planned predatory conduct against five unrelated young and vulnerable women over a significant period," the Australian AP report quoted the judge as saying.The judge also added that Dhankar’s presentation as a community-minded individual concerned with and active in improving the quality of life for others was "entirely inconsistent with his seriously flawed and predatory character" revealed in court.Until he was arrested in 2018, Dhankhar was highly regarded among the Indian-Australian community, founding a satellite group of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and acting as a spokesman for the Hindu Council of Australia.He has also worked as a data visualisation consultant with ABC, British American Tobacco, Toyota, and Sydney Trains, after arriving in Australia as a student in 2006.Police raided his Sydney central business district unit in 2018, and found date-rape drugs and a video recorder disguised as a clock radio.