Delhi cop flies to Odisha for a ₹2 lakh bribe. CBI catches him, then his boss: Officials

BHUBANESWAR: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Sunday arrested an inspector and constable of Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) in Odisha’s Bhubaneswar on charges of taking a ₹2 lakh bribe from a local journalist to omit his name from the charge sheet.

Constable Amit Lahucha was arrested by a CBI team in Bhubaneswar after he allegedly received ₹2 lakh from journalist Udaynath Sahu, who complained to the CBI about the bribe demand. After Lahucha allegedly told the CBI team that he was collecting the money on behalf of EOW inspector Sajjan Yadav, the police officer was arrested by a CBI team in Delhi.

According to the CBI, Sajjan Yadav was the investigating officer in a case relating to Bhubaneswar-based journalist Manoj Kumar Seth who was arrested in January this year on charges that he created a fake email account in the name of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath back in 2016 and sent out letters to public sector companies in the name of Yogi Adityanath, then a Lok Sabha MP, that asked the state-run firms to place advertisements in little-known newspapers edited by Manoj Kumar Seth.

This wasn’t the first time that Seth had been named in a criminal case. In July 2000, he was arrested by the Cuttack Police on charges that he blackmailed an executive engineer of Odisha’s public works department, threatening to publish fake news reports about him.

The investigating officer of the case, Sajjan Yadav had been allegedly threatening to implicate Udaynath Sahu in this case as an accused – he was a witness – if he didn’t pay a bribe. CBI said inspector Sajjan Yadav allegedly demanded a bribe of ₹4.5 lakh but later settled for ₹4 lakh.

Sajjan Yadav allegedly sent constable Lahucha to collect the ₹2 lakh from Sahu at the Biju Patnaik airport in Bhubaneswar on Sunday when he was arrested.