CBI registers three cases against Rohini ‘godman’, forms SIT

NEW DELHI : The CBI on Wednesday registered three cases to probe charges of rape and illegal confinement of girls and women at an ashram run by self-styled godman Virendra Dev Dixit in north Delhi’s Rohini.

The agency has formed a three-member special investigation team headed by a superintendent-level officer to probe these cases.

Two FIRS pertain to charges of rape, criminal intimidation and wrongful confinement against Virendra Dev Dixit and the third FIR was registered against unknown persons to probe charges of assault, wrongful confinement, voluntarily causing hurt and obstruction of duty when a committee appointed by the Delhi High Court visited the ashram on December 19.

The next day, the high court directed the CBI to investigate the alleged illegal confinement of girls and women in the ashram. It was also alleged that the women were kept in ‘animallike’ conditions behind metal doors in a ‘fortress surrounded by barbed wire’.

The high court bench – headed by acting chief justice Gita Mittal – had ordered the CBI director to constitute a special team to probe charges.

The CBI was directed to look into the FIRS lodged in Delhi against the Rohini-based ashram and Dixit and the daily diary entries relating to complaints of missing girls, commission of sexual offences and even a case of suicide there.

After the CBI probe was ordered, around four dozen minor girls and women have been rescued from Dixit’s ashrams in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh by the police.

The Delhi police had earlier claimed that its earlier inquiries into the activities of the ashram didn’t come up with evidence of criminality.

The present whereabouts of Dixit, originally a native of Farrukhabad in Uttar Pradesh, are not known.