Patna, May 13: Chief minister Nitish Kumar has urged his Karnataka counterpart D.V. Sadananda Gowda to take strict action against the sleuths of the latter’s state involved in the arrest of a youth from Darbhanga without keeping the Bihar police in the loop.

Nitish made this demand in a letter to Gowda on Saturday in connection with the arrest of Mohammed Kafil Akhtar from a Darbhanga village under Keoti police station on May 6. Later in the evening, the chief minister said he would write to the Union home ministry in this connection.

A team of Karnataka police took Akhtar in custody on the charges of his alleged involvement in the blast outside Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on April 17, 2010. Bihar director-general of police had written a letter to his Karnataka counterpart on the issue on May 9.

Giving details of the relevant sections of the CrPC dealing with the arrest of a person by a police team of another state, Nitish has written, “Under the above mentioned circumstances, I hope you will pass on necessary instructions to ensure that failure on the part of the police officers of Karnataka to follow the laid down legal procedures attracts suitable legal and administrative consequences.”

The chief minister wrote this letter in reply to the one sent by Gowda on May 10, mentioning that paucity of time and apprehension of escape of the arrested person forced the Karnataka police team to act in such a manner. Nitish refused to buy the logic of Gowda, though.

“To put the facts in the perspective, let me point out that your officers informed a court in Ranchi that they visited Darbhanga on May 5 and arrested Akhtar from his village on May 6 at 1.30pm. They produced him before the court at Ranchi on May 7 at 8pm. This clearly shows that your officers had more than enough time to take police officers of Bihar into confidence,” Nitish has written.

He added, “This brings us to another issue of taking the arrestee to Ranchi under the pretext of boarding a flight to Bangalore. It will not be out of place to mention that Patna is the nearest airport from Darbhanga. What is further intriguing is that the Karnataka police decided to produce the accused in the court of a judicial magistrate of another state, Jharkhand, who had no jurisdiction over the place of arrest in Bihar.”

Karnataka being a BJP-ruled state and Nitish running a government in Bihar with BJP in tow, the issues raised by him in the letter are also being seen from political angle. A senior BJP minister of Bihar said: “Such letters do not lead to any result. It is nothing but a gimmick to woo the minorities.”