Bhubaneswar: Retired Odisha IAS officer U N Behera has become the third high-ranking former bureaucrat to skip police summons for questioning regarding the alleged disappearance of two inquiry commission reports from the chief minister’s office (CMO).
Behera, who served as additional chief secretary to former Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik between November 2015 and January 2017, failed to appear before the ACP at 11 am on Sunday in connection with the ongoing probe. Senior police officers stated that a reminder notice will be served, while warning that persistent non-compliance could lead to formal legal proceedings.
Former IT secretary Manoj Mishra, who was also an officer on special duty to the former CM, is the only official to have appeared and recorded a statement before the investigating officers.
Earlier, former principal secretary to CM, Rajesh Verma, was served a fresh notice after he skipped similar summons to appear at Capital police station on July 22. Former IAS officer and close aide of Naveen Patnaik, VK Pandian, who was asked to appear before investigating officer Bipin Bihari Hota at the Zone-I ACP’s office at 11 am on Saturday, sent an email stating he was outside the country and cannot join the probe on the scheduled date. Instead, he urged the police to record his statement via video conference.
Meanwhile, police have already questioned 15 staff members who previously worked in the CMO and recorded their statements.
This missing files have sparked a political debate in Odisha, particularly around the sensitive Naidu Commission report on Kandhamal violence, which was submitted in 2016 but never made public.
According to the FIR, both reports, along with other files, had been forwarded to the CMO by the Home Department. While other files were returned on June 4, 2024, following the change in government, the two inquiry reports – – the Justice A S Naidu Commission report on the 2008 assassination of VHP leader Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati (which reached the CMO in September 2016) and the Revenue Divisional Commissioner’s inquiry into the 2016 fire tragedy at a private hospital in Bhubaneswar (forwarded to the CMO in May 2018) – were not. “The two reports are presently untraceable at the CMO. The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of these two reports create a reasonable suspicion that the reports may have been intentionally removed, retained, concealed, destroyed or otherwise unlawfully dealt with,” the FIR stated.
The case has been registered under multiple sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), including those related to theft, criminal breach of trust, causing disappearance of evidence, destruction of documents, and criminal conspiracy.