Bengaluru: Retired IAS officer M.N. Vijayakumar, who is persistently pressing for a fair probe into the death of Karnataka-cadre IAS officer Anurag Tewari, has charged that the CBI team investigating the murder is “highly incompetent”, “irresponsible” and “extremely biased”. He said, “No conclusive output can be expected from it.”
In a letter addressed to Cabinet Secretary P.K. Sinha, which he also released to the media at the Bengaluru Press Club on Monday, Mr Vijayakumar requested Mr Sinha to immediately reconstitute the CBI team, which he said is a pack of “junior officers which has established beyond doubt that it is incompetent to handle the case”.
He said, “Many pieces of evidence point to the direct involvement of Mr Tewari’s batchmate P.N. Singh, vice-chairman of Lucknow Development Authority who stayed with Mr Tewari in Lucknow prior to his murder, and his immediate boss in Karnataka. But the team hasn’t questioned them yet. It was this team that promoted the much-touted drug use by Mr Tewari as the cause of his death which was later demolished by the viscera report. This reveals the intentions of the team and its impulse to jump into conclusions.” Stating that the CBI team has not yet visited the two people seen in a video, he said that Mr Tewari had spoken to them for about two hours on the scam in the Food and Civil Supplies Corporation. The two had informed him about the scam, and Mr Tewari had told them that he would meet them once he returned from Mussoorie.
Mr Tewari’s elder brother Alok Tewari, who spoke to reporters over phone, said that the investigating team is overlooking the involvement of two IAS officers, one from Karnataka and another from Uttar Pradesh.
“P.N. Singh was with Anurag in the same room the day he was murdered. The team never took him into custody and questioned him. On March 25, 2017, Anurag told me that he had a meeting with his boss for five hours and he was threatened. He told me that he was offered a bribe two days later which he refused. Unless these two IAS officers are interrogated, the case will continue to remain a mystery,” he said.
“Anurag was under tremendous pressure and was scared that something would happen to him. It was for that reason he had purchased spy cameras and installed CCTV cameras at the house,” he said.
