The police on Sunday carried out simultaneous searches at the homes of the eight people arrested on the charge of stealing crores of rupees and valuables from the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
“We had already recovered several lakhs in cash and some valuables from them. This raid was conducted to find (documents that would reveal) where they had spent the money stolen from the temple,” a police officer in Lucknow said.
“We will submit the evidence to the special investigation team. This raid was planned on the basis of the interrogation of the accused before they were sent to jail custody on Friday.”
Five of those arrested — Anukalp Mishra, Luvkush Mishra, Ramashankar Mishra, Avinash Shukla and Karunesh Pandey — were temple employees who counted the daily offerings and donations.
Ramashankar Yadav aka Tinu and Manish Yadav had the keys to the vault. Subhas Srivastava, a retired bank employee, was the vault supervisor. “Some land documents and bank details have been seized from Tinu’s home. They can be crucial to proving that he had bought properties with illegally acquired money,” the officer said.