ONE YEAR ON, CBI RULES OUT FOUL PLAY IN VYAPAM-LINKED DEATHS
Agency says deaths linked to health issues
BHOPAL: The year-long probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into 24 mysterious deaths linked to the Vyapam scam has revealed no foul play in the death of Madhya Pradesh governor Ram Naresh Yadav’s son Shailesh Yadav – who was found dead at his house in Lucknow on March 25, 2015 or in 11 other deaths linked to the multi-crore scam and has closed the probe.
50-year-old Shailesh Yadav was found dead at his residence in Lucknow’s Mall Avenue area on the morning of March 25, 2015, a month after being named an accused in an FIR filed on February 18 for allegedly recommending ten people as contractual teachers for the state government in 2013.
According to sources in the agency, the probe so far into Yadav’s death has not revealed any foul play.
He was a known diabetic and blood pressure patient, who possibly died of brain haemorrhage. Nothing incriminating has been found so far to suggest that he committed suicide or was killed, sources confided to Hindustan Times.
The premier investigation agency has also not found anything incriminating during the sustained probe into 11 more mysterious deaths, including that of pharmacist Vijay Singh Patel, who was found dead in a room at a guest house owned by a BJP leader in Kanker-Chhattisgarh in April 2015.
A native of MP’s Rewa district, Patel who was an accused in three cases of the multi-layered scam died due to cardiac arrest, CBI investigations have revealed.
The other 10 deaths include those of Aditya Chaudhary alias Ravi Pippal, Mahendra Singh alias Bunty, RS Bhadauria, Rahul Solanki, Lalit Kumar Godara, Brijesh Rajput, Jitendra Yadav, Vikas Thakur, Rinku Sharma and Narendra Pal Singh.
The agency which had filed preliminary enquiries to probe these deaths in 2015 has closed the probe in these deaths. It’s likely to be mentioned in the status report by the CBI, which is likely to be filed before the Supreme Court later this month.
The central agency which began probe into the scam in July 2015 following directions by the Supreme Court, however, is still probing 12 other mysterious deaths linked to the scam.
No major headway has been made yet in the mysterious deaths of TV channel journalist Akshay Singh (July 2015), the death of one of the scam middlemen Dipak Jain in Gwalior, or the deaths of other racketeers Anand Singh Yadav, Vikas Pandey, Anant Ram Taghore, Ashutosh Tiwari, Rajendra Arya and GS Jatav. In nine of these cases, the police had not probed the deaths at all.
Primarily, most of these deaths have been allegedly caused due to cardiac arrest, different forms of cancer, liver failures, while one of these 12 men Raghvendra Prakash Singh had allegedly committed suicide in June 2014.