Pravin Kumar (right) interacts with villagers in Borka on Wednesday. Picture by Eastern Projections

Borka (Changsari), Dec. 17: Over a year has passed since the death of FCI executive P.C. Ram.

This morning, his son and brother arrived at the very village, Borka near Changsari on the outskirts of Guwahati, where the top Food Corporation of India executive in the Northeast was killed in a crossfire between Ulfa rebels holding him captive and security forces.

For the duo, their first trip to the village was to strengthen their resolve to get to the root of the entire drama and the conspiracy behind it.

Ram’s son Pravin Kumar said they would move Gauhati High Court within the next few days seeking the court’s direction for the CBI to ensure that it conducts an “impartial” inquiry, speed up the probe besides submitting the progress report of the investigation till date.

Pravin said the CBI probe “seems to have made little progress as far as pinpointing the mastermind(s) of the abduction and killing of his father is concerned” and he strongly suspects that certain forces were out to derail the investigations.

Pravin was accompanied by his uncle and Ram’s younger brother Shivlochan during his visit to the spot in a bid to unearth the truth, as the family of the slain officer believes that in this case there are more things than what meet the eyes.

They videographed the house and its surrounding areas where Ram was held captive by Ulfa. They also took measurements of the entry and exit routes, doors, windows, the total floor area of the room where Ram’s bullet-riddled body was found in the house owned by a 64-year-old farmer, Gobinda Deka.

Pravin and his uncle closely observed almost each and every article, which was there at Deka’s residence, particularly the bed under which Ram’s body was found lying in a pool of blood close to the body of an Ulfa militant.

Apart from Ram, two Ulfa militants were also killed in the encounter with police during a botched rescue attempt on the night of July 11, 2007.

“The basic purpose of today’s visit is to gather as much evidence as possible and then try to piece all these together, which will be useful in ascertaining whether some gaps were left while probing the case,” Pravin said.

After arriving in Guwahati early this morning, the two men went to the village where the encounter had taken place. They spent a couple of hours there and also spoke to many villagers, including Gobinda Deka, his wife Naomani and other members of the family.

Pravin’s attempt was to get a first-hand account of the incident in a bid to know what had actually happened on that night as the family refuses to believe the police version.

“We have reasons to believe that some influential persons, including some senior officers of the FCI, had actually hatched the conspiracy and then used Ulfa militants to abduct my father,” Pravin said.

“It was on November 28 last year, the case was taken over by the CBI but till date our family was kept in the dark about the current status of the probe. That’s why we are going to file a miscellaneous writ petition in Gauhati High Court seeking its intervention,” Pravin said.

“I found it strange when I came to know that the members of the CBI team probing the case had put up at an FCI guesthouse in Guwahati at least once during one of their visits and used the company’s cars,” he said.

Ram’s younger brother Shivlochan Ram said Gauhati High Court told him that he was free to re-approach the court if he was dissatisfied with the inquiry.

Shivlochan filed a writ petition in November last year alleging that his brother had been abducted because he came in the way of an influential contractor-official cartel operating in the FCI’s Northeast office.

Shivlochan’s advocate Nekibur Zaman said the court’s intervention was necessary to get justice, as there had been a lot of discrepancies in the entire episode. He said the petition has reasons to believe that the CBI probe may be biased as an influential person was trying to scuttle investigations by influencing the sleuths.

Pravin claimed that photographs which he had collected from different sources showed that an AK-series rifle found on a slain Ulfa cadre was locked, but later it was shown as unlocked.

Echoing Pravin, Zaman said all these “loose ends and grey areas” created doubts about the impartiality of not only Assam police, but also the CBI.