IG Zaidi suspended again, this time for pressuring woman IPS officer
SHIMLA: The Himachal Pradesh government has suspended inspector general of police (IG) Zahur Haider Zaidi, who is an accused in the Kotkhai custodial death case, for pressuring Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Soumya Sambasivan to change her statement.
The suspension orders were issued by the department of home on Wednesday, a week after the special CBI court in Chandigarh directed the DGP to take appropriate action against Zaidi.
Zaidi was posted as chief executive officer of the state Waqf Board.on January 8, Sambasivan, a prosecution witness in the custodial death case, told the Central Bureau of Investigation court that Zaidi has been trying to contact her over phone since September 2019. He used the phone of the Shimla police headquarters and made calls from his mobile phone via Whatsapp while trying to contact her and her subordinate staff. “He continuously tried to pressure me to change my statement and has even said that I should be ready to face a team of lawyers and a 30-page questionnaire, adding that you will not inform this to the CBI (sic),” she alleged. Sambasivan said she was so disturbed on the work front that she had to report the matter to the DGP on December 10, 2019, at Dharamshala.
On the DGP’S intervention, Zaidi stopped calling her up from the police headquarters phone but used some people to contact her reader and PSO to know her location daily.
Sambasivan was provided extra security to reach the court as she claimed that Zaidi used people to influence her and tried to find out her whereabouts through her subordinate staff till her arrival in court.
Zaidi is among nine people indicted by the CBI in the custodial death case of one of the six suspects in the rape and murder of a schoolgirl in Shimla.