CBI arrests 4 in Dubey murder, says it’s working to find motive

As The Indian Express reported earlier, the agency has said that there was evidence to file at least four cases related to the corruption complaints Dubey made.

The four arrested include Uday Mallah who is a fish vendor, Mantu Kumar who works as a porter, hawker Tutu Kumar and a PCO phone booth owner Rajesh Mehtar alias Babloo, all of them in their 20s and residents of the notorious Katari village near Gaya where Dubey was shot.

Babloo’s name was first reported by following the suspicious suicides of two Katari residents who were questioned by the CBI.

Significantly, CBI officials who returned from Gaya today and got only an hour or two of interrogation time with the four suspects (in transit, even in the train from Patna) say they expect to arrest four or five more persons in the case.

They also say that while two of these four suspects have admitted to Dubey being killed in the manner described by rickshaw-puller Pradeep Kumar, the missing eye-witness in the case, they cannot put the murder as a crime committed for simple robbery or a mafia hit. CBI Director U S Mishra told The Indian Express: ‘‘We will be trying to link these arrests with the mysterious deaths of two other persons after being questioned by the CBI after which I too had visted Gaya.’’

CBI officials said that two of the four have indicated that Paswan and Sahu were administered poison since there was an apprehension of them spilling the beans on Dubey’s assailants to the CBI. ‘‘We are yet to link the two crimes but the suspects have indicated that they were involved in a local gang in Katari. We have reason to believe the men in our custody could be responsible for 25 or so crimes in the area,’’ a key investigator said. After getting a 10-day custody for the four suspects, the CBI is expected to put them to some sustained interrogation as well as a polygraphy test.

In the absence of Pradeep Kumar, the CBI team is also considering calling Satyendra Dubey’s brother, Dhananjaya to Delhi and presenting the suspects before him. Officials say they now hope to file the charegsheet in the case before the expiry of the 90-day deadline. Earlier, the CBI had described the Dubey investigation as a jinxed one. After the deaths of the two suspects, Katari had virtually been out-of-bounds for CBI officials and the agency had to resort to sending in its sleuths incognito into the village. With elections over, the CBI impressed upon the state administration in Gaya that they needed to work alone on the case.

It is understood that eventually, it was deception that worked. The CBI spread the word that it had traced the assailants to a different gang and then waited for these men to return home. When the CBI finally went in to nab the gang last night, one suspect managed to escape.