A Bengali policewoman whose crackdown on cyber crime in Jharkhand partly inspired the 2020 Netflix series Jamtara is now leading the interrogation of the 26/11 accused Tahawwur Rana.
Colleagues described Jaya Roy, Bengal-born IPS officer of the Jharkhand cadre and a deputy inspector-general with the National Investigation Agency (NIA), as a soft-spoken person but a “stickler for rules” and a “hard taskmaster”.
Roy, who happens to be a medical graduate too, and her senior colleague Ashish Batra, a 1997-batch IPS officer from the Jharkhand cadre, participated in the last lap of Rana’s extradition process in the US. They were on the special flight that brought the terror accused to Delhi on Thursday evening.
“Jaya is a very upright and hardworking IPS officer. She is soft-spoken but a no-nonsense officer,” one of her seniors in the NIA said.
A junior colleague in the agency said: “Her personal integrity cannot be questioned. She often tells us that it’sher duty to see that theguilty, however mighty, are punished and the poor getjustice. She is a hard taskmaster and has blasted usseveral times over lacunae in investigations.”
Born in April 1979 in Bengal, Roy passed her MBBS finals in 2010. A year later, she cleared the UPSC exam. Her parents live in Sahibganj in Jharkhand where herfather N.R. Roy is a well-known physician.
The 2011-batch officer shot to fame when her team cracked down on cyber criminals in Jamtara, a sleepy district town in the Santhal Pargana region of Jharkhand, making a slew of arrests over several months.
Jamtara has been known for the proliferation of gangs specialising in cyber fraud, such as sending phishing messages, threatening digital arrest, and conducting online job rackets and fake investment schemes.
Roy was deputed to the NIA in 2019 as superintendent of police for a four-year term. She has since been promoted to DIG and had her termextended.
Rana, remanded in NIA custody for 18 days, has been lodged in a 14ftx14ft cell equipped with an air-conditioner, CCTV cameras, a bed and an attached toilet.
He is under round-the-clock surveillance and is being interrogated for his suspected links with the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, accused of masterminding the Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.