GUWAHATI: Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Friday asked Congress leader Pawan Khera to surrender.
Sarma, who is campaigning for the BJP in West Bengal, said Khera could not get away by running away from the law.
“I think Pawan Khera should surrender before the law. The more you run away from the law, the bigger the problem becomes,” the Assam Chief Minister said.
“I will just tell him to come to Guwahati and surrender,” he further stated.
Barely a few days ahead of the April 9 Assam elections, Khera had claimed that Sarma’s wife possesses passports of three countries, owns luxury properties in Dubai and has investments worth several lakh crore rupees in the United States.
The claims made her lodge an FIR against him with the Crime Branch police station in Guwahati and it registered a case.
Even as the Assam Police were searching for him, he approached the Telangana High Court and it had on April 10 granted him one-week transit anticipatory bail.
The Assam government moved the Supreme Court challenging the bail and it stayed the high court order two days ago.
On Friday, the apex court refused to entertain Khera’s plea for interim protection from arrest and asked him to approach a competent court in Assam to seek anticipatory bail.
Earlier, Sarma had dismissed Khera’s claims outright, and sniffed a Pakistani angle to it.
He claimed that the “fraud and fabricated” documents that the Congress leader had relied on while making the serious claims were “supplied from a Pakistani social media group.”