Official held by CBI for graft, his wife, daughter commit suicide
MCA director-general Bal Kishan Bansal’s wife Satyabala (58) and his daughter Neha (28) committed suicide on Tuesday afternoon at Neelkanth Apartments, police said.
Bansal and co-accused Gopal Krishnan, a chartered accountant, were produced on Tuesday morning before a special court, which extended their CBI custody by three days for further interrogation.
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TWO DAYS after a senior official of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) was arrested by the CBI on charges of corruption, and hours after he was produced in court, his wife and daughter were found hanging in two separate rooms at their apartment in Delhi’s Madhu Vihar.
MCA director-general Bal Kishan Bansal’s wife Satyabala (58) and his daughter Neha (28) committed suicide on Tuesday afternoon at Neelkanth Apartments, police said.
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Bansal and co-accused Gopal Krishnan, a chartered accountant, were produced on Tuesday morning before a special court, which extended their CBI custody by three days for further interrogation.
On Monday, the CBI had conducted a raid at Bansal’s residence for the second time. Bansal’s son Yogesh Bansal, who ran a property business, has been absconding since the CBI’s first raid on July 16.
Sources told The Indian Express that Bansal was the senior-most officer of the Corporate Law Service and used to provide recommendations to the ministry on technical matters, reporting directly to the Secretary (Corporate Affairs).
He was arrested by the CBI on alleged charges of bribery and attempting to scuttle a probe against a Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company that faces allegations of duping investors and diverting funds abroad.
Bansal was arrested after the CBI allegedly caught him accepting a bribe of Rs 9 lakh, based on information that the agency obtained from unidentified sources.
Joint Commissioner of Police (Eastern range) Satish Golcha said police received a call about the suicides around 1.30 pm. “Two separate suicide notes have been recovered. Prima facie there seems to be no foulplay. However, investigations are being carried out and the bodies have been sent for postmortem,” he said.
The security guard at Neelkanth Apartments said he was the first to be informed about the suicides around 1:15 pm on Tuesday by two domestic staff working with the Bansal family. He added that the mother and daughter were last seen at around 10 am on Tuesday, when they had come down “to see off a relative from Ghaziabad”.
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“The two staff, Rachana and Anita, came down to the entrance of the building and cried for help. They said Bansal’s wife had tried to commit suicide by hanging herself from the ceiling fan. Immediately, I informed the complex manager, Raghuveer Singh, who rushed to the spot and called police,” said R B Mishra, the guard.
Said manager Singh: “When I reached their house, the main door was partially open, through which we could see Satyabala hanging from the ceiling fan using a dupatta. There was a gap of about one foot between her feet and the bed. All of us stood in a state of shock and could not do anything. However, police soon took control.”
Singh said that initially they thought only Satyabala had committed suicide. But when they failed to get any response from Neha’s room, police broke open the door to find out that Bansal’s daughter had also committed suicide in a similar manner.
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“Neha was to get married soon,” said S R Batra, secretary of the apartment complex.
“The Bansals moved into the first floor apartment in 2012. They did not interact much with neighbours. Most of us thought he had taken voluntary retirement because they led a middle-class life,” said Batra.
“The Bansals also owned another apartment in the second floor of the same building,” said G L Pahwa, their neighbour.
Asked about the CBI raid on Monday, Pahwa said, “They began their raid at around 3:30 pm on Monday and continued till 5:30 am the next day.”
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Earlier on Tuesday, the CBI told the special court that they had recovered 4-5 kg of gold and Rs 56 lakh in cash from Bansal. The agency alleged that Bansal had made “a settlement” with the private firm for Rs 50 lakh from which Rs 11 lakh was paid as the first installment.
The Rs 9 lakh, with which Bansal was caught, was allegedly the second installment, the agency said.
Kaunain Sheriff M is an award-winning investigative journalist and the National Health Editor at The Indian Express. He is the author of Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant, an investigation into one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies.
With over a decade of experience, Kaunain brings deep expertise in three areas of investigative journalism: law, health, and data. He currently leads The Indian Express newsroom’s in-depth coverage of health.
His work has earned some of the most prestigious honours in journalism, including the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award, and the Mumbai Press Club’s Red Ink Award.
Kaunain has also collaborated on major global investigations. He was part of the Implant Files project with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which exposed malpractices in the medical device industry across the world. He also contributed to an international investigation that uncovered how a Chinese big-data firm was monitoring thousands of prominent Indian individuals and institutions in real time.
Over the years, he has reported on several high-profile criminal trials, including the Hashimpura massacre, the 2G spectrum scam, and the coal block allocation case. Within The Indian Express, he has been honoured three times with the Indian Express Excellence Award for his investigations—on the anti-Sikh riots, the Vyapam exam scam, and the abuse of the National Security Act in Uttar Pradesh. ... Read More
