Ibrahim Sharief in Bhubaneswar on Friday. Picture by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, March 28: Senior officer of the Bureau of Mines Ibrahim Sharief returned to the city today after disappearing for more than four months. The 34-year-old mining engineer had been missing since November 25.

The reason behind his disappearance remains a mystery with police officials failing to provide any insight into the circumstances under which he went missing. The engineer has denied that he had been kidnapped.

“It looks like he was fully prepared to leave the city on the day of the incident. On that day, he left home much before his usual office time. He parked his vehicle in the parking lot of a private hospital,” said police commissioner R.P. Sharma, adding that the police was interrogating the engineer to find out the exact reasons behind his disappearance.

The engineer had not communicated with his family members at Bellary in Karnataka since he went missing. However, he eventually called his father on March 23 and had expressed his desire to return to the city.

The police are yet to clarify how much money he was carrying and how he sustained himself during the period that he was missing. They have also not clarified why he decided to call his father on March 23.

The engineer had stayed at several places in Uttar Pradesh and Uttrakhand since he went on missing from the city. Sharif’s last place of stay was Dehradun in Uttarakhand and before that, he had visited Allahabad, Mughal Sarai, Varanasi, Hardwar and Joshi Math, the police said.

Though the cops had traced his mobile phone in Allahabad on November 24 and December 4, they failed to nab him.

During investigation, the police had found that the password of Sharief’s Facebook account was changed on December 24 and this had been done from a cyber café at Joshimath in Uttarakhand. Sharief’s family members had been demanding a CBI probe into his disappearance suspecting abduction.

They had even moved the high court seeking a CBI enquiry. They had also alleged that he might have been abducted because his duty was to inspect mines in Odisha and mining operations in the state had witnessed violation of norms. The police had visited several places in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa and Uttarakhand searching for him but in vain.

The return of the engineer to the city, however, comes as a big relief for the police, which had lost hope in the case and had also proposed to the state government to order an inquiry by another investigating agency. The state government too had planned to hand over the case to the CBI.

His family members expressed happiness over his return. “The trauma of his missing days was unbearable. We are happy that he has returned safely,” said his mother.

Senior officials at the Bureau of Mines said the chances of departmental action against him were unlikely.

“Departmental action is initiated against those who remain absence without proper leave for six months. So he needs to explain to the head office. The head office will decide on his fate,” said a senior bureau official.

Sharief, a native of Bellary of Karnataka, used to work in a Goa-based private mining company before being posted at IBM, Bhubaneswar, on January 27, 2011.