Thiruvananthapuram, March 11: The man who is suspected to be rape convict Bitti Mohanty was today remanded in the custody of Kerala police for 10 days.
The police had sought his custody for further investigation on charges of cheating, forgery and impersonation, which they have registered against him. The Kerala police has constituted a 21-member special investigation team to probe all aspects of the case.
“The case is spread across four states — Kerala, Odisha, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. The team will be divided into various units and each will travel to different states to collect evidence,” deputy superintendent of police K.S. Sudharsan told The Telegraph.
He also hinted that the suspect, who was arrested in Kannur on Saturday, may be handed over to Rajasthan police after his custodial interrogation here was completed.
The probe team’s job, sources say, will include verifying the convict’s credentials to establish that he was indeed Bitti, son of former Odisha DGP B.B. Mohanty, and verifying physical and technical data to unravel his backers.
The cops are fairly convinced that it would not have been possible for Bitti, who was living under the assumed name of Raghav Rajan, to secure personal identity documents such as a passport and voter’s identity card without the help of somebody in the upper echelons of administration. “It also remains to be establish how he managed to pay his tuition fees and other expenses,” said an official.
The suspect had lived at Ananthapur in Andhra Pradesh for three years from 2005 and investigations would focus on his contacts there to know if any of them was acting as a conduit.
It also emerged today that the anonymous letter that sealed the suspect’s fate was written by a female colleague. Two copies of the letter were sent — one to the State Bank of Travancore’s Madayi branch, where he worked as a probationary officer under the false name, and the other to the bank’s HR department.
The bank took up the matter with the state DGP, who, in turn, alerted Kannur police chief Rahul A. Nair. The man was finally picked up from a lodge in the town hours before he was planning to flee from the place.
