Honey-trap case: SIT chief replaced again

The Madhya Pradesh government has removed Sanjeev Shami as chief of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up to probe the honey-trap and black-mailing racket busted in the state last month. Shami has been replaced by cyber cell's Special Director General Rajendra Kumar, according to an order issued by the state Home department late Tuesday night.

With this, the SIT has been re-constituted for the second time in nine days. Besides Kumar, who is a 1985-batch IPS officer, the SIT will have two other members - cyber cell's Additional Director General (ADG) Milind Kanaskar and Indore's Senior Superintendent of Police Ruchi Vardhan Misra, the order said.

It did not mention any reason for reconstitution (rpt reconstitution) of the SIT. Last week, CID Inspector General Sreenivas Verma was replaced by ADG Shami as the SIT chief.

Shami was then appointed after Verma apparently expressed reluctance to head the probe into the high-profile racket. The state government set up the SIT on April 23, hours after a PIL was filed before the Indore bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, seeking a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the racket.

The BJP wants the case to be probed by the CBI. "We know why the BJP is demanding CBI probe into the racket. They want to save some people involved in it," MP Congress spokesman Bhupendra Gupta claimed.

"Two-three days ago, the Supreme Court (while hearing a case) observed that 'CBI is not God', while emphasising that not every case needs to go to the central probing agency," he said. When the BJP was in power in the state, it opposed the Congress' plea for a CBI probe into the multi-crore admission and recruitment-related 'Vyapam' scam, he said.

It was the Supreme Court that finally ordered probe by the central agency into the scam, he added. Five women and a man were arrested from Indore and Bhopal last month for allegedly running the honey-trap and blackmailing racket.

The racket was busted after an engineer of the Indore Municipal Corporation approached police, claiming he was being blackmailed over some objectionable video clips by the accused who were trying to extort about Rs 3 crore from him. The accused - Aarti Dayal (29), Monika Yadav (18), Shweta Vijay Jain (39), Shweta Swapnil Jain (48), Barkha Soni (34) and Omprakash Kori (45) - are currently in judicial custody..

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)