Railgate: CBI faces court's ire for discrimination

New Delhi, Jul 19: A court here has pulled up

for discriminating in the matter of arresting the accused, who include former Railway Minister P K Bansal's nephew, in the Rs 10 crore cash-for-post railway bribery case, saying it was "very disheartening".

The court took strong exception that in the case, in which the probe was being monitored by the CBI Director, two of the ten accused were not arrested, despite the charge sheet against them. The remarks of the judge came, while dismissing the bail pleas of accused C V Venugopal and M V Murali Krishan, who were chargesheeted by CBI, but were not arrested during the probe into the case.

"The submissions that due to paucity of time or due to limited resources, they were not able to arrest them reflects poorly on CBI. It is very disheartening since Director, CBI, himself was monitoring the investigation of this case.

"No doubt, CBI has succeeded in filing the charge sheet in time, but that does not mean that they will discriminate between the accused persons," Special CBI Judge Swarana Kanta Sharma said. The judge also said although CBI had arrested three accused Sameer Sandhir, Rahul Yadav and Sushil Daga, who are in judicial custody, on similar allegations as that of Murali and Venugopal, the agency is unable to explain why these two chargesheeted accused were also not arrested.

"It is, however, very strange that CBI had arrested and sought police custody remand of Sameer Sandhir, Rahul Yadav and Sushil Daga, but on is unable to explain properly as to why these two accused persons i.e accused C V Venugopal and accused M V Murali Krishan, facing similar allegations, were not arrested during investigation," it said.

Besides Murali, Venugopal, Sandhir, Yadav and Daga, CBI had chargesheeted Bansal's nephew Vijay Singla, former Member (Staff) of Railway Board Mahesh Kumar, MD of Bangalore-based G G Tronics India Pvt Ltd Narayan Rao Manjunath, alleged middleman Sandeep Goyal and Ajay Garg.

PTI