Unthinkable,severe blow to our probe: CBI chief

CBI director U C Mishra has admitted that the suicides of two suspects questioned by the agency in the Satyendra Dubey murder case are a &#1...

CBI director U C Mishra has admitted that the suicides of two suspects questioned by the agency in the Satyendra Dubey murder case are a ‘‘serious setback’’ to the investigation.

‘‘What has happened is unthinkable,’’ he told The Indian Express tonight. ‘‘We could never imagine that people who have been questioned by us will end their lives in this manner. This has never happened before.’’

Mishra also acknowleged that with the suicides, the pace of investigations will slow down. ‘‘The case has done a turnabout with this development. We will have to pacify people, see that the situation cools down and only then proceed with the investigations.’’

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What’s important is that the CBI’s version in Delhi is at variance with that of the Gaya police.

While CBI officials claim they questioned the duo ‘‘briefly’’ over three days, locals say it was almost a day-long interrogation. Also, while the CBI says the two men had a criminal record this is being disputed.

CBI officials claim Mukendra Paswan and Sheonath Sao were two of the four rounded up by the local police after a murder near

the railway station on January 24.

One CBI official handling the case described the demeanour of the two as ‘‘shaky’ during questioning. However, another version is that Paswan and Sao bragged to the CBI that they could help the agency crack the case.

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Interestingly, a day after the suicides, CBI bosses in New Delhi said they cannot now rule out the possibility of the two men being directly involved in Dubey’s murder.

It is understood that a section of the investigating team is returning from Gaya, possibily on Tuesday, to brief the bosses about the events leading upto the suicides and what Sao and Paswan told the CBI.

In the meantime, the agency has still no news of Praveen Kumar, the rickshaw-puller who is the original eyewitness and mysteriously disappeared from the CBI office around January 8 after allegedly borrowing money from CBI staffers who were actually meant to guard him.

The
day after: egg on CBI’s brave face

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More

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