The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials involved with the probe in the murder of RTI activist Satish Shetty, have said that the scrutiny of call records of the people they are examining and the analysis of data retrieved from the hard disks of their computers, has revealed information that could lead to the fresh arrests.
Shetty, who hails from Talegaon Dabhade, in Pune district, was stabbed and killed on his morning walk on January 13, 2010. The Pune rural police, who initially conducted the probe, arrested and charge-sheeted lawyer Vijay Dabhade and four others. In November 2010, the case was transferred to the CBI on a writ petition by Shetty’s brother Sandip.
“We are now digging deeper and by the third week of January we expect a major development,” CBI sources said. “Many facts, which had not come to light before, have come to the fore after we carried out a series of raids at various places last month. Some new and shocking names have cropped up.”
The focus of recent raids has been on IRB Infrastructure Developers Limited, against whom Shetty had lodged a complaint with the Pune police crime branch about an alleged land scam involving the company’s chairman Virendra Mhaiskar. In 2009, Shetty also wrote to the Pune police seeking protection, as he was apparently being threatened.
The IRB group has been in the spotlight recently over huge unsecured loans the company is reported to have extended to Purti Sugar and Power Limited run by BJP president Nitin Gadkari. The company is said to have bagged contracts from the Maharashtra government when Gadkari was public works minister in the state.
