Hours after the BJP released a “sting video” to claim that Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia had taken “commissions” worth “hundreds of crores” to benefit private players under the now scrapped excise policy, Sisodia claimed that a CBI officer who died by suicide was under pressure to frame him in a false case. The CBI denied the allegations and termed his statements as a “mischievous and misleading.”
The CBI said the allegation was “an attempt to divert attention from the ongoing investigation in Delhi Excise Policy case”. In a statement, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said its officer, Jitendra Kumar, was in “no way connected” with the probe related to the excise police case. It also made it clear that no clean chit has been given to any of the accused in the matter.
“The CBI strongly refutes this mischievous and misleading statement by Sisodia. It is clarified that the gentleman officer, late Jitendra Kumar, was in no way connected with the investigation of this case”, the CBI said.
“He was Deputy Legal Advisor in-charge of prosecution; in which capacity he was supervising prosecutors who are conducting the trial of already charge-sheeted cases in Delhi,” the CBI said.
Reacting to the CBI statement on Twitter, Sisodia insisted that Kumar was a law officer dealing with his case and repeated his allegation that the office committed suicide due to the pressure to make a false story to implicate the AAP leader. “There should be an independent judicial enquiry - headed by a retired Supreme Court judge - into the causes of death of CBI Deputy Legal Advisor Late Jitendra Kumar,” he said in another tweet.
“Two days ago, a CBI official committed suicide. We found that the officer was Jitendra Kumar, he was a legal advisor in CBI’s anti-corruption branch. His job was to approve or reject things based on legality. He was also looking into the legality of the FIR against me,” Sisodia said.
“We have found that he was being pressured to build a false case against me in a wrong manner and pressure was being built to arrest me. He was not permitting this. And there was so much pressure on him that he committed suicide. This is very sad. Pressure was being mounted to make a false case legally sound. This is wrong. My sympathies are with his family,” he said.
“I also want to request Prime Minister Narendra Modi - if you want to trap me in a wrong case, do it. You wanted to raid me, you did it. You filed a false case against me. You want to arrest me, tell me where you want me to come and I will be there. Please don’t pressure officers and lead them to commit suicide,” he said.
The deputy Chief Minister also hit out at the Prime Minister alleging that he only thinks of destabilising non-BJP Governments by poaching MLAs.
On the other hand, the CBI said in its statement that according to the Delhi Police, which is conducting inquest proceedings into the death, the officer has not held anyone responsible for his death in his suicide note. The CBI also said the excise policy case is under investigation and “as such no clean chit has been given to any of the accused”.
Asked about the BJP’s “sting operation” on the issue, Sisodia called it a “joke”. He said that the CBI found nothing at his house and in his locker and gave him a “clean chit”. “The CBI has given me a clean chit as it did not get anything and that is why the BJP is coming up with these tactics. This is not a sting operation, this is just a joke,” he said. The AAP leader also said the BJP may make someone sitting in a car say something but that does not make it a sting operation.
“This is just a joke. I can also share many such sting operations and you should publish those,” he told reporters.
Sisodia said: “BJP has been saying there is a scam and quoting numbers like Rs 30 crore, Rs 144 crore, Rs 1,300 crore. Then they got the CBI to file an FIR, wherein they tried to drag me into the white dealings between two companies. That was also on the basis of sources. My house was raided. They searched my locker, they didn’t find anything”.