Dara shifted to Baripada circle jail

BARIPADA, FEBRUARY 2: Dara Singh, the prime accused in the gruesome killing of the Australian missionary, Graham Stuart Staines, and his t...

BARIPADA, FEBRUARY 2: Dara Singh, the prime accused in the gruesome killing of the Australian missionary, Graham Stuart Staines, and his two minor sons, who was remanded to judicial custody by the Karanjia sub-divisional judicial magistrate on Tuesday night till February 14, was shifted to Baripada circle jail on Wednesday on security reason.

Dara was kept at the sub-jail at Karanjia on Tuesday night. However, the Mayurbhanj Superintendent of Police, Y B Khurania, made a written request to the district collector to shift him from Karanjia to Baripada jail as the sub-jail did not have a special cell for the notorious criminal.

After obtaining necessary permission from the collector, Dara Singh, who was arrested early on Tuesday from the dense forest bordering Mayurbhanj-Keonjhar district of Orissa, was shifted to the Baripada circle jail, official sources said here.

Dara carried a reward of Rs 8 lakh on his head, and according to DIG police Sushil Kumar Pradhan, had confessed to having killed Staines, a Muslim trader Sheikh Rehman and a Catholic priest Arul Doss.

Pradhan said Dara, whose real name is Ravinder Kumar Pal, maintained that he was a devout Hindu and had acted on his own motivation and had no link with any political party or persons. He also maintained that he had no intention of killing Staines and had only planned to 8220;teach him a lesson and terrify him. But somehow the incident took an ugly turn.8221;

Dara said that after killing the Catholic priest Doss, he was on the run but felt miserable. He claimed that he preferred to surrender and did not run away from the forest despite being aware of a police team heading there.

Dara, who hails from Etawah district of Uttar Pradesh, said he had a job in Bata India godown in Delhi and came to Mayurbhanj through friendship with one Chitranjan Das sometime in 1997 or 1998.

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Initially he worked in a grocery shop belonging to the elder brother of Chitranjan before starting his own small business in clothes and timber. Later with the support of local mahant community and other Hindu youths he started protesting against transport of cows to nearby Jamshedpur in Bihar for slaughter.