Laloo-Sharma links alleged

Meanwhile, Laloo, Jagannath Mishra and four other accused were remanded to judicial custody till November 13, after special CBI court judge S K Lal on the conclusion of the hearing on the second day, reserved the judgement on their bail applications.

Ansari mentioned the mysterious killings of witnesses in the scam cases and argued that they had been eliminated. Quoting exhaustively from government files, which the CBI had seized during investigation, Ansari charged Laloo with stopping the probe into the scam in 1994 itself. He said that on January 1, 1994 theemployees union of the Animal Husbandry Department had held a meeting with the then minister C D Verma and decided to hold an enquiry into the allegations. But on June 13, 1994 Laloo held a meeting with the minister and stopped the probe.

Later the case was handed over to a senior IPS official, D N Sahay, but this too was foiled at Laloo’s behest, the CBI counsel said. The then chairman of the public accounts committee, Jagdish Sharma, had also volunteered to enquire into the scam. Ansari pointed to relevant portions of the file wherein the former chief minister had given instructions for stopping the enquiry.

During this year, fraudulent withdrawals in the department had increased by 274 per cent which pointed to a well calculated conspiracy, the counsel argued.

Ansari also challenged Laloo and Mishra’s stand on “amalgamation of all the scam cases” and cited the Supreme Court observation that all the cases needed to be dealt with separately.

The CBI counsel said that even while in jail one of theprime accused, R K Rana, used to communicate with Laloo on a mobile phone. He even told his cohorts that “everything would be settled”. Ansari revealed that at least two witnesses, Ajit Verma and Jayant Jaiswal, have conveyed to the CBI that they were being threatened regularly. He also referred to the statement of Deepesh Chandok where he had confessed that attempts were being made to tamper with evidence in the cases.

Ansari confirmed that the CBI during the raid on the Chief Minister’s residence had procured incriminating documents which revealed how efforts were still being made to tamper with the evidence.