Mystery shrouded the death of BJD Zilla Parishad (ZP) member Dharmendra Sahoo, who was found hanging in his residence at Sishupalgarh on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar on Saturday.
Sahoo, who was found hanging from the portico of his house, was the member of ZP Zone 11 in Nimapada of Puri district.
While the exact circumstances leading to the death were yet to be ascertained, a Facebook post by him just four hours before his death has deepened the suspense.
In the post, he mentioned about some video clips stored in two mobile phones. “All the videos are in my two mobile phones. Please bring all those to limelight,” Sahoo wrote in Odia.
Later, a police sniffer dog squad managed to locate the two mobile phones after much effort. The Commissionerate police sent the body for postmortem and were investigating into the incident.
Sahoo, who originally belonged to Khandiakud village under Gop block of Puri, lived with his family at Silupalgarh.
Sahoo's father-in-law said, “This (suspected suicide) is not the result of one day’s quarrel. Rather, it was going on for the past three months. After quarrel, he used to leave home and stay in a hotel for some days. He had gone to somewhere and was brought to home after a lot of persuasion. However, he attempted to end his life at home. I never filed an FIR because we wanted to unite the family, not break it. He often tried to extort money from me. But last night, he came home drunk and said “Either I will kill or die.”
However, Sahoo’s death took a political twist with the BJP alleging the role of Minister Samir Ranjan Dash in the case. BJP leader Pravati Parida alleged that Dash is the main character behind the marital discord in Sahoo’s family and demanded a high-level probe into the case.
“It does not appear like a suicide but a well-planned murder. In his social media post, Sahoo has urged to bring to public the videos stored in his two mobile phones. It implies that he might have suspected that he would be killed, for which he made the post. The way his body was found also hints that he might have been killed and hung from the balcony to make the case look like a suicide,” Parida alleged.
However in his reaction Minister Dash said, ““I have no knowledge of the matter. I can only speak about it after understanding the case.”