BENGALURU: Top Lokayukta staffers colluded with a city-based Right to Information (RTI) activist in an attempt to extort Rs 1 crore from an executive engineer, a special court was told here.
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The case pertains to an FIR that was lodged back in 2015 and then Lokayukta Bhaskar Rao, his son Ashwin Rao and Lokayukta PRO Syed Riyaz are among seven people chargesheeted in the case, which was probed by a Special Investigation Team (SIT). This is the first of five different cases filed by SIT against the accused in bribery and corruption cases of 2015.
Deposing in the court on Saturday, te then deputy inspector-general of police (DIG), Lokayukta, Sonia Narang narrated how Bengaluru Urban zilla panchayat executive engineer MN Krishna Murthy approached her in May 2015 saying that some staffers from Lokayukta were trying to extort Rs 1 crore from him.
"Krishna Murthy told me that he met Krishna Rao, who claimed to be the joint commissioner, in the second-floor conference room of the Lokayukta building on May 5, 2015. According to Murthy, Rao demanded Rs 1 crore to prevent a Lokayukta raid on him," Narang said. Narang is now additional director, Enforcement Directorate.
In his deposition earlier last week, Murthy mentioned that extortion talks were held inside the conference room on the second floor of the Lokayukta office. "In July 2017, SIT sleuths showed me a photo of a person I identified as the man who had claimed to be joint commissioner Krishna Rao. I later learnt that his real name was N Ashok Kumar and he was a close associate of RTI activist V Bhaskar alias 420 Bhaskar," Murthy said.
The other accused in the chargesheet are V Bhaskar, N Ashok Kumar alias Krishna Rao, Srinivas Gowda, and Shankar Gowda.