CHANDIGARH: The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Punjab Police probing the Rs 6,000-crore drug case has summoned senior Shiromani Akali Dal leader and former minister Bikram Singh Majithia who is brother-in-law of party president Sukhbir Singh Badal to appear before it on October 5.
The SIT has also summoned dismissed Punjab Police DSP and Ex-Wrestler Jagdish Bhola on the same date.
It may question both Majithia and Bhola face-to-face for the first time in the multi-crore drug racket case.
Bhola was arrested in November 2013 by the Punjab Police in connection with the drug racket and seized drugs worth Rs 20 crore from his house. The Enforcement Directorate later pegged the money laundering and drugs racket at Rs 6,000 crore. Bhola named Majithia in 2014. ED sleuths had questioned Majithia the same year in connection with the case when he was the minister in the then Akali government. The two being summoned together has raised the possibility that they could be cross questioned.
The summonses come at a time when Majithia has been raising the issue of the alleged misuse of official residences of AAP ministers. Majithia's name first surfaced in the Bhola drug racket of 2013-14.
Punjab Police booked Majithia under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act on December 20, 2021, when the then chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi-led Congress government was in power based on a 2018 report by the anti-drug Special Task Force that recommended a further probe.
The STF report was based on confessional statements given by some accused, including Jagjit Singh Chahal, Jagdish Singh Bhola and Maninder Singh Aulakh, of the 2013 multi-crore drug racket case, given to the ED and the agency investigated the case under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
Majithia has denied any role and called the case politically motivated. A 40,000-page chargesheet was filed against him in the case last year. The akali dal leader spent more than five months in Patiala jail and walked out of prison in August 2022 after the Punjab and Haryana High Court granted him bail in the case.
