The Shillong session: When Rajeev Kumar was quizzed for 39 hours over 5 days

KOLKATA: The 39 hours and 45 minutes of intense battle of nerves and mind — spread over five days — in Shillong had brought former Kolkata Police commissioner Rajeev Kumar (he was the commissioner then) face to face with a host of CBI officers — several of them SPs — earlier this year.

Kumar, who had maintained he was like any other member of the Special Investigation Team formed to probe the Ponzi scam, was questioned initially on the Saradha case before the sleuths moved on to the Rose Valley case.The third and fourth day of questioning was particularly significant, when former Trinamool MP Kunal Ghosh, whom Kumar had earlier arrested in this case, was brought face to face with him. By the fourth day, the CBI had started asking him specific questions on Rose Valley, including the alleged “suppression” of an FIR registered under the Durgapur Asansol Commissionarate.
Located far off from the tourist spots, the CBI office at Oakland — largely a residential area in central Shillong — witnessed over eight hours of questioning on some days. Kumar had left the CBI office even at 10.20pm on the third day. He had arrived with two other IPS officers — additional CP (I) Jawed Shamim and present joint CP (crime) Murlidhar Sharma and a few STF officers, a day before scheduled questioning had started on February 9. He returned on February 13 soon after CBI allowed him to leave. He had reportedly written to CBI to allow him some time to respond to certain notices.
Some of the questions, the source claimed, to Kumar revolved around an April 18 Bidhannagar Police raid on Sen’s Midland Park headquarters in Salt Lake. Several raids followed over the next few days at multiple locations, including an IT firm that maintained the Saradha’s database. Some documents and hard disks were seized. The CBI has harped on the charge that all the seized evidence were not handed over to them by the SIT, a charge bitterly contested by Kumar.
The agency has already alleged in the court that the FIR registered by the Durgapur Police on October 4, 2013 was allegedly suppressed by the SIT. That is why the CBI could not register “its own FIR” against Rose Valley in Bengal, it said in an affidavit to the Supreme Court. The FIR registered in Durgapur came to light after the central agency started investigation in connection with Rose Valley cases in Odisha.
Kumar’s take, however, was that he had several responsibilities as the then Bidhannagar police commissioner and the Ponzi probe was only one among them. Kolkata Police sources had then indicated that some of the questions Kumar was asked didn’t fall under his purview. “For example, he was asked to respond to policy-level decisions on the formation of the special investigation team (SIT). It was formed by the state government and Kumar was only the police commissioner of Bidhannagar,” a source said.