City CBI has no expertise in DK ravi case

BENGALURU: The CBI team in Karnataka has no expertise in investigating cases such as the mysterious death of IAS officer DK Ravi. The CBI office in Bengaluru is a 75-member Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) trained to investigate economic crimes. Given this, the Ravi case ­ which the government is entrusting to the CBI ­ will be handled by CBI officials from outside Karnataka. Chances are that the investigators may be appointed from the Chennai CBI zone -which has a crime branch -or a special team may be constituted in Delhi and dispatched to Bengaluru for the investigation.

Sources in the Bengaluru CBI office revealed that officers and staff posted here dealt with only cases of financial fraud and graft, and that they were not trained to investigate cases such as murder, suicide and rioting. Even in the two recent cases that the state handed over to the CBI -the 2012 rioting between advocates, media and the police at the City Civil Court and the 2012 murder of 17-year-old Soujanya, a student of SDM College in Ujjre in Dakshina Kannada -teams from outside the state were put in charge of the investigation.

Meanwhile, the Home Department passed the order on Tuesday evening officially asking the CBI to investigate the “unnatural death“ of Ravi.According sanction for the CBI to probe the case, the order states: “The CBI shall investigate the matter within three months and take necessary action.“

The state government has filed an interlocutory application before the High Court seeking to vacate the stay that prevented chief minister Siddaramaiah from tabling the preliminary report of the CID in the Legislature on Monday .

Additional Advocate General AS Ponnanna reiterated the government stand that the preliminary report should be tabled in the legislat u r e a s t h e g ove r n m e n t i s “answerable to the public“. Justice Abdul Nazeer observed that the CID report had become irrelevant as the government had decided to hand over the case for a fresh investigation to the CBI.