By IANS,
New Delhi : A city court Wednesday remanded sacked Assam education minister Ripun Borah, arrested here Tuesday for allegedly offering bribe to a CBI officer investigating a murder, to three-day police custody.
Additional Sessions Judge R.K. Yadav allowed the plea of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and remanded Borah and Ramesh K. Maheshwari, a co-accused, to CBI custody till June 7.
The CBI arrested Borah on the charge of offering a bribe of Rs.1 million to one of its officials for influencing a murder probe.
It urged the court that the two people’s custody was required as it needed to collect the missing links of the circumstantial evidence from Guwahati.
“The accusations, justifying their arrest, are well founded. Conspiracy is hatched in darkness and that is to be probed during the thorough interrogation. Any missing link may impede the investigation,” the court said.
Allowing the agency’s plea, the court said the circumstances suggested there was a conspiracy among Borah, Maheshwari and Mukul Pathak, a journalist arrested at the Guwahati airport, to bribe the official who was probing the murder case in which Borah was a suspect.
The CBI alleged that Borah, in his bid to wriggle out of the probe against him in the 1996 murder of Daniel Topno, a Congress leader in northern Assam’s Gohpur town, tried to bribe Deputy Superintendent of Police A.B. Gupta, who was apparently probing whether Borah had any role in the murder.
According to the probe agency, Borah, along with conduit Pathak, had come to Delhi June 2 and invited the official to a hotel at Sunder Nagar in south Delhi.