Bihar shelter home scandal: CBI raids premises of ex-minister Manju Verma, main accused Brajesh Thakur

Verma resigned as social welfare minister last week after it was disclosed that Thakur had spoken to her husband 17 times between January and June this year.
Former Bihar Social Welfare Minister Manju Verma | PTI
Former Bihar Social Welfare Minister Manju Verma | PTI

PATNA: CBI officials on Friday conducted simultaneous raids on 16 premises spread across five districts in Bihar linked to the state’s former social welfare minister Manju Verma and Brajesh Thakur, the main accused in the shelter home sexual abuse case.

Verma, who was forced to resign as minister on August 8, and her husband, former MLC Chandeshwar Verma, were questioned for about four hours by a CBI team that reached her 6, Strand Road residence. Sources said the former minister and her husband were questioned separately about their alleged links with Thakur, who was arrested on June 3.

This is the first time CBI, which took over the case on July 29, questioned the former minister and her husband. Sources said CBI officials also called Manju Verma’s personal assistant Amaresh Kumar to her residence and questioned him. The house of Sunil Jha, a counsellor in the social welfare department, was also raided and he was grilled, added the sources.

During the raid at the Patna office of Thakur’s Hindi newspaper ‘Pratah Kamal,’ CBI officials seized filed and notebooks containing telephone numbers. In the rooms used by Thakur, several dozens of condoms and aphrodisiac medicines were seized, said sources.

The houses of Manju Verma and her husband in Begusarai district were also raided simultaneously and several files and bank passbooks were seized by CBI sleuths.

In Muzaffarpur, the houses of Brajesh Thakur, his relatives Suman Shahi, Ritesh Anupam and Manoj Kumar, and Thakur’s in-laws’ house at Rohua were also raided. Sources said several documents having evidential value in the case under probe were seized during these raids.

“The raids were conducted in Patna, Muzaffarpur, Begusarai, Motihari and Samastipur. Information gleaned during interrogations and the documents seized are going to add momentum to the probe,” said a source familiar with the probe.

The case relates to the prolonged sexual abuse and violence inflicted on minor girls lodged at a government-funded shelter home in Muzaffarpur run by an NGO headed by Thakur. Medical examinations confirmed that at least 34 girls were raped several times during their stay at the facility.

After the horrific abuses came to light in a social audit report of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Muzaffarpur police registered an FIR on May 31. Ten people have since been arrested.

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