Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress Committee (CGPCC) President Bhupesh Baghel has demanded CBI probe into Jheeram valley massacre of senior State-level Congress party leaders by Maoists in Bastar in May 2013.
The probe should be headed by a sitting judge of Supreme Court or High Court, he demanded in a letter addressed to Chief Minister Raman Singh.
Chief of Communication Wing of the CGPCC, Shailesh Nitin Trivedi informed that Baghel had written a letter to Chief Minister Raman Singh regarding the Jheeram incident and had demanded from him to include the probe on conspiracy too in the incident.
The probe over the conspiracy was at present not in the ‘Terms of Reference’ of the judicial probe going on, he said.
Baghel in the letter had also stated that NIA is doing only doing the criminal probe over the issue and conspiracy behind the incident should be included in the investigation, he said.
Baghel in the letter had charged that some of the Maoists involved in the Jheeram incident who had surrendered were interrogated only by the state police. Why they were not interrogated by the NIA, Baghel had questioned.
He further informed that Congress party too had got some information in past couple of years which needs investigation further. It is possible that the truth regarding conspiracy over the matter would come to fore from it, he added.
Charging that the BJP was responsible for changing the direction of probe, Baghel said in May 2014 when UPA was in power, the NIA had named Maoists leaders Ramnna and Ganpathi as the persons behind the conspiracy but after the BJP-led NDA came to power at the Centre after September 2014, the names of them were removed from the charge sheet and the state-level Maoists were included in the charge sheet as responsible for the conspiracy.
Small state-level Maoist leaders can not dare to take such a big action and the change in name in the charge sheet after the BJP Government came to power raises a big question mark, Baghel said.