After eight days of the intensive police raids, Special Investigation Team sleuths have nabbed the main accused in the Saran mid-day meal tragedy and headmistress of Dharmasati Gandaman Primary School Meena Kumari on Wednesday.
She was arrested while she was going to surrender before the court of Chief Judicial Magistrate in Chhapra. Immediately after her arrest, she was taken to the town police station of Chhapra where she is being interrogated by senior police officers.
The chief of the SIT, specially constituted for probing into the mid-day meal tragedy and Chhapra’s Superintendent of Police Sujit Kumar said that a thorough interrogation of the headmistress would be done to get all vital clues from her. Besides the SP, IG (CID) Vinay Kumar, the DIG and other senior police officers are interrogating her in presence of the women police personnel.
Meena Kumari is likely to be produced before the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Chhapra on Thursday. A public notice declaring her as a proclaimed offender was also pasted at her Chhapra residence.
The notice had asked her to surrender before the police otherwise her property would be attached. She has been booked under Section 302 (murder) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC. A probe by Chhapra’s Divisional Commissioner and DIG had charged Meena Kumari with the criminal negligence, leading to the death of 23 children in the mid-day meal tragedy.
Meanwhile, State Director General of Police Abhayanand told mediapersons that grocery items used for preparation for the mid-day meal was being bought from her residence. He said that the circumstantial evidences suggest that not many people were involved in executing the conspiracy plan, resulting in the loss of innocent lives.
He said that the conspiracy theory was only corroborated when the FSl tests found huge concentration of pesticides in meals served to the children on the fateful day. Before her arrest, Meena Kumari told mediapersons in Chhapra that she is falsely being implicated in the incident, demanding a CBI probe into the entire tragedy.