Rajasthan Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) on Sunday arrested an official of the Special Operations Group (SOG), the state’s premier police agency, a day after it trapped an alleged middleman while accepting a bribe of Rs 2 crore purportedly on behalf of the now-arrested officer.
The ACB said a case will be registered under Sections 7 and 7A of the Prevention of Corruption Act and Section 61(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
The court has remanded both the middleman and Mukesh Soni to three days of custody. Even after Ramesh was arrested, my name was nowhere to be found in the charge sheet filed against him. He further alleged that Mukesh pressured the investigating officer, Shyamsundar, to forcibly implicate him in two additional cases. Manohar wrote that his ability to function had been stripped away, stating, “I am not dead [physically], yet the entity known as the police has ‘intentionally’ murdered me. He was posted as the Circle Officer (CO) for Ajmer South. Allegations were raised that he failed to conduct the investigation properly in order to benefit the accused.
The entire matter concerns a demand for a bribe in exchange for filing a closure report in the Udaipur Municipal Corporation’s 272-plot scam case and releasing seized goods. He had been appointed as a History lecturer in 2021 but was subsequently suspended pending an investigation into irregularities in the recruitment examination. In his alleged suicide note, Manohar wrote, “My name does not appear in the FIR registered at the Ajmer SOG branch against Ramesh Kumar (a Grade-2 Hindi teacher). The then-investigating officer, Mukesh Soni, questioned 6-7 individuals who had been apprehended during the proceedings-such as Dr Suresh, Shailesh Khichad, and others-asking who Manohar was, how much money he possessed, and what he was currently doing. Observing the failure of police officers to conduct investigations correctly, the Rajasthan High Court ordered an inquiry against three police officers, including Mukesh Soni, in 2022.
The accused middleman, Sajjan Kumar, was allegedly accepting the money on behalf of SOG Additional Superintendent of Police Mukesh Kumar Soni, the official said.
