The PMLA Special Court on Thursday took cognizance of the charge sheet filed by the ED against 10 accused including Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader Antu Tirkey in the land scam related to former Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren. The trial will be heard after the charge is framed against these accused.

The accused include two employees of the Registrar of Assurance office in Kolkata, Sanjit Kumar and Tapas Ghosh, Hazaribagh resident deed writer Md. Irshad, land dealer Afsar Ali, Priyaranjan Sahay, Saddam Hussain and Bipin Singh. All of them were arrested by the ED last month. Later, the agency interrogated several accused including JMM leader Antu Tirkey by taking them on remand.

A large number of fake deeds were recovered from the residences of some of these accused in the raid conducted by the ED in 2023 in the land scam. During the investigation, it has been confirmed that the original documents of many of these lands were made missing from the office of Registrar of Assurance in Kolkata and made available to the land mafia and after this, fake deeds were prepared by tampering with these documents.

In the charge sheet filed by the agency, JMM leader Antu Tirkey and other accused have been said to be involved in the scam. According to the charge sheet, all the accused in collusion with each other made the restricted category land free from restriction by tampering with the original documents of the land. In return, a huge amount of money was transacted.

JMM leader Antu Tirkey, one of the accused, has been the metropolitan president of the party. In the year 2019, he left JMM and contested the assembly elections from Khijri seat of Ranchi on the ticket of Jharkhand Vikas Morcha. He has been doing land business for a long time.

In this land scam case, more than a dozen people including former Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, former Deputy Commissioner of Ranchi Chhabi Ranjan have been arrested.

The Jharkhand High Court on Wednesday heard the arguments of Enforcement Directorate challenging the bail plea moved by former chief minister Hemant Soren. The ED counsel challenging the bail plea of former CM pleaded that, former CM Soren was instrumental in illegally acquiring land at Bargain in the capital.

Challenging the bail plea, ED counsel SV Raju pleaded that Soren had acquired the land in 2009–10 and a boundary wall was constructed to secure its possession. Earlier, Soren, had filed a petition before the high court on May 27, seeking bail in a money-laundering case linked to an alleged land scam.