Manimajra SHO booked for seeking ₹5L bribe
GRAFT CHARGE Middleman arrested while accepting part of the bribe money
CHANDIGARH :The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday booked inspector Jaswinder Kaur, station house officer (SHO) of Manimajra police station for demanding a ₹5 lakh bribe from a man, Gurdeep Singh, to drop charges against him in a cheating case.
She is reportedly on the run and has been suspended from her post. Inspector Neeraj Sarna, posted at the Traffic Lines has replaced her as the SHO.
Bhagwan Singh, a middleman working for Kaur, was arrested by CBI officials on Monday while accepting ₹1lakh as part of the bribe money in Sangrur from Gurdeep. He had also telephoned Kaur in the CBI officials’ presence to inform her that the money had been received.
After this CBI raided the police station as well as Kaur’s residence from 11 pm to 6 am and later sealed both. Since then, she had evaded arrest and was not answering her mobile phone, bureau officials told the CBI court on Tuesday.
Gurdeep had told CBI that he had earlier paid ₹2 lakh on June 19 as part of the bribe to Bhagwan in Sangrur.
THE COMPLAINT
Gurdeep had told the police on June 10, that he had met Kaur at the Manimajra police station to inform her about a case that he claimed was false and lodged against him by a man named
Randhir Singh.
Randhir had alleged that Gurdeep had taken ₹28 lakh from him for getting his wife a government job, but had done nothing. He was also not returning the money.Directing Gurdeep to refund the amount, Kaur had threatened to register a case against him and later allegedly asked for a ₹5 lakh bribe to drop the charges.
Gurdeep said he had paid ₹ 2 lakh to Bhagwan on June 19 and then approached CBI on June 26 with a handwritten complaint. He had alleged that Kaur had got his signatures on blank paper, which “could have been misused.”
During the raids, Kaur had told CBI officials that Gurdeep and Randhir had reached a compromise and the former had agreed to return the full amount of ₹28 lakh.
However, CCTV camera footage collected from her office belied the claim, sources said.
MORE HEADS TO ROLL
Bhagwan was produced before the CBI court on Tuesday and his custody granted to CBI for four days as, according to CBI, he knew about the involvement of other persons in the case.
CBI officials said Kaur had been asked to join the investigations but was “intentionally and deliberately avoiding” doing so.
CONTROVERSIAL PAST
Kaur is no stranger to controversies. Her name had cropped up when CBI arrested sub-inspector Mohan Singh of Chandigarh police in 2017. He had allegedly asked a man named Prem Singh Bisht for a bribe of ₹9 lakh to drop the names of three of Bisht’s employees from an FIR registered in an attempt to murder case.
This was reportedly done on Kaur’s directions. She was then SHO of the Sector 31 police station. CBI officials had caught Mohan Singh accepting a bribe of ₹2 lakh from Bisht.
Bisht had alleged before the court that he was being issued threats and asked to turn hostile the 2017 case. The sanction for her prosecution is pending with the Chandigarh police.
Senior police officials will now be scanning records of all the cases investigated by Kaur, including a triple murder.