BHUBANESWAR/BALANGIR : With the police failing to make any major progress in identifying the accused in parcel bomb explosion which claimed two lives in Patnagarh on Friday, senior BJP leader and former minister KV Singhdeo on Monday urged Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to hand over the case to a Central investigating agency, preferably Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) or National Investigating Agency (NIA).In a letter to the Chief Minister, Singhdeo said the parcel bomb that killed Soumya Sekhar Sahu, the newly-wed man of Patnagarh in Balangir district and his grandmother Jemamani, has sent shockwave across the State. Sahu’s wife Reema was critically injured and is undergoing treatment at SCB Medical College and Hospital, Cuttack.
Singhdeo, who is Patnagarh MLA and leader of the BJP legislature party in the Assembly, said people of his constituency are demanding that the case should be handed over to either CBI or NIA for better investigation in view of the inter-state links. Such a move will instill confidence in the people of State in general and Patnagarh, in particular.Writing separately to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Singhdeo has brought the attention of the former to the gruesome incident while requesting his intervention for a probe by one of the Central agencies.
Meanwhile, Additional Superintendent of Police Sashi Bhusan Satpathy said teams of Balangir Police are still working to get possible clues. The contacts of Soumya Sekhar are being verified and scrutinised, he added.Though the police had identified the sender of the parcel as RK Sharma from Raipur on Sunday, they are not sure of its authenticity as no one who sends a parcel bomb would give his real name and address.
Soumya Sekhar’s father Rabindra Kumar Sahu has also requested the Chief Minister to order CBI inquiry into the incident. “I have appealed to the Chief Minister for CBI inquiry into the tragedy that has ravaged my family”, he said. Reema Sahu, the widow of the deceased techie, was shifted to SCB Medical College and Hospital, Cuttack on Monday morning. She has been admitted in the plastic surgery ward of the hospital.