Satyendra Dubey

Patna, March 22: A CBI special court today pronounced three persons guilty of murdering Satyendra Dubey, an IIT-educated civil engineer who was murdered after he blew the whistle on corrupt practices in the Golden Quadrilateral Project.

His assassins, though, have been convicted of robbery and murder, not for eliminating the 32-year-old in any conspiracy linked to the project of the National Highway Authority of India.

Dubey was shot dead on the intervening night of November 26-27, 2003, in Gaya when he was on his way home in a rickshaw.

The convicted trio — Mantu Kumar, Udai Kumar and Pinku Ravidas — have been found guilty under Sections 302 (murder), 394 (causing hurt in robbery and 27 A (possessing illegal weapons) of the IPC.

The fourth accused, Shravan Kumar, became an approver, giving all the details to the CBI that chargesheeted the other three in September 2004. All the four hail from Katari village in Gaya, Bihar.

Following a hue and cry from the Opposition and in the media across the country, the Bihar government handed over the case to the CBI in December 2003.

Dubey had written to the Prime Minister’s Office in 2002 alleging corruption and poor quality of work in the Golden Quadrilateral project.

In the letter, he had named some people and requested that his name be kept a secret as he feared his life was in danger. The PMO received the letter on November 11, 2002, but Dubey’s name got leaked.

The quantum of sentence will be announced on March 27.

Dhananjay Dubey, the brother of the slain civil engineer, said he was “really disappointed” with the conviction as the three were “purely innocent”. “The real culprits are still on the loose. It is simply a cover-up by the CBI. The statement of the CBI is totally false,” he said, hinting that he suspected a larger conspiracy, not the motive of robbery, to be behind the killing.

Two years after Dubey was killed, IIM graduate B. Manjunathan was gunned down allegedly by the petrol mafia in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri because he stopped dealers from selling adulterated oil.

In September 2006, Raj Kumar Sharma, an irrigation department engineer, was shot dead in Basti, also in Uttar Pradesh, because he had declined to sign a fake bill.