The suspended IPS officer who stays in news for his diatribes against Narendra Modi on social media had accused the then Chief Minister of Gujarat of complicity in the 2002 riots in the State on the basis of a meeting he claimed to have attended at the CMO while it turned out he was too junior at the time to be present in the CM's meeting with senior cops and also that he was far away from Gandhinagar at the time of the alleged meeting. Gujarat Police say he and six other subordinate policemen involved in an opium cultivation and peddling racket, who also framed a lawyer, will be arrested soon.
Gandhinagar/New Delhi: Sanjiv Bhatt, former, disgraced IPS officer of Gujarat, was taken into custody on Wednesday in connection with a 1998 drug case. According to another report, he has been detained for falsely implicating a lawyer from Rajasthan in a case involving narcotic substances dating back to 1996.
Earlier, Bhatt was taken to Gujarat's CID office for interrogation. Bhatt has been barred from entering the fourth and fifth floor of the DGP office after being detained.
Bhatt has been arrested in a case of cultivation and peddling of narcotic substance opium in Palanpur in 1998. Bhatt was DCP of Banaskantha in 1998. Bhatt, along with six other subordinate policemen, has been detained in the case. CID Crime has said that all these people have been detained on the basis of evidence.
Lawyer Sumersingh Rajpurohit had filed the case against Bhatt, then serving as SP of Banaskantha district, and others in Pali, Rajasthan, 22 years ago. Even as the Gujarat High Court recently ordered a special investigation team (SIT) of CID to investigate the case, it points at a much larger racket as Rajpurohit had named Justice Jain, too, who was a judge in the High Court at the time.
Rajpurohit complained in his case that he had been kidnapped and framed under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. The lawyer's family was allegedly forced to vacate a rented house that belonged to Justice Jain’s sister in Pali. According to the police of the time, Rajpurohit had been found to be in the possession of 1 kg of opium when he was arrested at a hotel in Palanpur, Gujarat.
Bhatt can be arrested any time.
IPS Sanjeev Bhatt of the batch of 1988 was sacked by the Gujarat government for using a government vehicle and police commandos in Ahmedabad.
Bhatt has been in news for several years for his allegation of complicity of then chief minister of the State (now Prime Minister) Narendra Modi. However, his allegations were always questionable, as the authorities found, on the basis of his phone records and further evidence, that he was far away from Gandhinagar during the meeting of Modi, as CM, with senior police officers at the CMO in Gujarat’s capital.
Not only that, in 2002, Bhatt was too junior to have attended a meeting of senior police officers with the chief minister.
While Bhatt was posted in Junagadh, he did not join his duty. He stayed put in Ahmedabad while having no qualms about using the official vehicle and police commandos there.
After his dismissal, Bhatt wrote on his Facebook profile, “After 27 years of service in the Indian Police Service, I was finally removed. Once again I have become eligible for employment.”
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