A 32-year-old woman was on Tuesday allegedly harassed by a group of 10 male co-passengers inside a Metro coach all the way from Esplanade to Tollygunge, where she got off but was unable to escape their advances until her screams alerted security personnel.

“I thought they wouldn’t follow me after I alighted from the train, but they surrounded me on the platform. I don’t know what would have happened had RPF (Railway Protection Force) and Metro officials not come to my rescue,” the woman said of her ordeal.

The 10 accused, all of them in the age group 20-25, were arrested and taken to Regent Park police station.

According to the woman, she was singled out moments after she boarded the train at Esplanade station around 4pm. She said her alleged tormentors, each of them holding shopping bags, had followed her into the coach.

“Metro-te ja khushi hote pare…(the things that can happen on the Metro),” the woman quoted one of the men as saying with his gaze locked on her.

After the woman’s cry for help at Tollygunge station, the group allegedly tried to flee but was stopped and taken to the station superintendent’s cabin.

Based on the complainant’s account of what had happened during the Metro ride, Regent Park police station was informed.

A team of officers and a female constable arrived at the station before 5pm.

Charges were being drawn up against the accused late on Tuesday. The police said all of them were residents of the city’s southern fringes.

The woman they had allegedly targeted is a mother of a teenaged son and lives in Konnagar with her family. She is doing a course in fashion design at an institute in Esplanade and was going to a private tutor’s home in Sakherbazar when the incident occurred.

“The men were nudging and falling over me. When I protested, they started abusing me,” the woman said. “I know the difference between accidental contact on a crowded train and repeated, intentional touch.”

An elderly passenger offered his seat to the woman and advised her to ignore the men, she said.

“Around 4.20pm, when I was alighting from the train at Tollygunge, the men followed me. They again started abusing me. My screams alerted the police and they stopped the group.”

Women facing harassment while using public transport is a common complaint, but the Metro has generally been regarded as safer than buses, autos and local trains. But as Tuesday and some other recent incidents have shown, it is no longer so.

On April 30, a group of Metro passengers allegedly attacked a young man and a woman for hugging each other in public. That incident had triggered a storm on social media.