The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday issued summons to eight Indian Police Service (IPS) officers from West Bengal to appear before its Delhi headquarters for questioning in connection with the coal smuggling scam.
Of the eight IPS officers who are being summoned between August 21-31, two are additional director ranking officials namely ADG of Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and Special Task Force (STF) of the state police, Gyanwant Singh and ADG of state Intelligence Branch (IB), Rajeev Mishra.
Two of them are deputy inspector ranking officers, namely DIG (traffic division) of state police, Sukesh Kumar Jain, and DIG of state civil defense, Shyam Singh.
The remaining four are superintendent ranking officers namely SP (Purulia) S Selvamurugan, SP of the state anti-corruption branch, Koteshwara Rao, the SP of West Bengal Police Recruitment Board (WBPRB), Tathagata Basu, and the SP of the state counter-insurgency force, Bhaskar Mukherjee.
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ED sources said that they have some specific clues about the direct or indirect involvement of all these officers while coal smuggling was at its peak and the central agency sleuths would like to question them on how this menace could happen while they were in office.
The ED and CBI, which are conducting parallel probes, have identified Asansol in the West Burdwan district and portions of Purulia district as the epicenter of the scam.
“We have earlier interrogated junior level cops like sub-inspectors, inspectors, and deputy superintendents of police in this connection. But now we will interrogate higher-level officials to get more clues in our course of the probe,” an ED official said.
The ED has already questioned Trinamool Congress’s national general secretary and party MP, Abhishek Banerjee, who also happens to be the nephew of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, as well as his wife Rujira in connection to the case.
A Thailand-based bank account, purportedly held by Rujira, is currently under the ED scanner.
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