Three convicted of killing Dubey

PATNA: A special court on Monday convicted three men for murdering National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) engineer Satyendra Dubey, the whistleblower who had exposed corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral highway project in Bihar.

Six years after the 31-year-old IIT-Kanpur alumni was shot dead, CBI special court judge Raghvendra Singh held the three accused guilty of murdering Dubey, the project engineer of the NHAI. The court will pronounce the quantum of sentence on March 27. The convicted men are Mantu Kumar, Udai Kumar and Pinku Ravidas.

Dubey, who had exposed several cases of large-scale flouting of rules and corrupt practices in the construction project, was gunned down in the early hours of November 27, 2003, in front of the Circuit House in Gaya when he was going to his residence from the railway station.

Dhananjay Dubey, brother of the victim, said he was “disappointed” since the three convicted people are “innocent”. “The real culprits are still on the loose. It is simply a cover-up by the CBI. The statement of CBI is totally false,” he added.

The CBI, which had taken over the investigation of the case from Bihar police on December 14, 2003, had filed a chargesheet in the case on September 3, 2004.

During the investigation, CBI arrested four persons — Mantu, Udai, Pinku and Sharvan Kumar, all residents of Katari village in Gaya, Bihar. “They had all assembled near Circuit House, Gaya, on the fateful night of November 26-27, 2003. Around 3.30 am on November 27 when Dubey was passing in front of Circuit House in a cycle-rickshaw, the accused persons robbed him of his belongings and during the scuffle, Mantu shot him dead with a .315 country-made weapon,” it said in a statement.