Thursday (September 26): Central Bureau of India (CBI) has made first arrest of senior IPS officer SMH Mirza at the agency’s Nizam Palace office today in the Narada sting operation case.
Mirza was interrogated for an hour before he was officially arrested. Hours later, a special CBI court at Bankshall sent Mirza to CBI custody for five days till Monday.
The arrest comes nearly three years after CBI took over the Narada case.
The Narada tapes were released before the 2016 Assembly elections. The CBI initiated a probe into the case after being directed by the Calcutta High Court and later filed a case against 14 people, including SMH Mirza and 12 Trinamool Congress leaders.
What has happened?
Mirza was taped accepting money from Narada news portal editor Mathew Samuel during a sting operation. During interrogation by the Enforcement Directorate, which is probing the money trail into the case, Mirza accepted that he took cash from Mathew Samuel but as “donation” to an orphanage.
Mirza — the then police superintendent of Burdwan — had met Samuel at his residence in Burdwan where the sting was recorded. Samuel had allegedly met Mirza for the first time at a hotel in Camac Street.
As per CBI sources, a few more arrests are likely to happen after Mirza.
In the videos, several individuals, including Mukul Roy and Sovon Chatterjee, who are now with the BJP, and Trinamool Congress’ Firhad Hakim, Subrata Mukherjee, Sougata Roy and others, were seen purportedly discussing receiving cash from a journalist who posed as a person with business interests in Bengal. The videos were shown on Narada TV.
