A special CBI court at Asansol has issued an arrest warrant against “absconding” TMC youth leader Vinay Kumar Mishra on Wednesday in a cross-border cattle smuggling racket in West Bengal.
He is considered close to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, PTI reported the agency as saying.
One of the Trinamool Youth Congress’ General Secretaries, Mishra was summoned by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) several times in the last one month but he skipped all summonses.
The last summons was served on January 19, the sources said. The agency had also issued a Lookout Notice against him.
The CBI had recently raided Mishra’s residence in Kolkata’s Rashbihari Avenue area but failed to arrest him since he is “absconding”, the sources added.
The agency issued a look out circular (LOC) against Mishra, sources said, as the TMC Youth Congress General Secretary is missing. His father had been handed a notice, asking him to appear before the agency.
The crackdown came ahead of state Assembly polls in April-May this year. The central agency is now probing the larger conspiracy angle to the cattle-smuggling racket.
The CBI had filed an FIR in September last year against six persons, including some Border Security Force and Customs officers, who were allegedly bribed by international cattle smugglers.
The probe agency has been on a massive search spree for the last few weeks in the eastern state in connection with the alleged cross-border cattle smuggling and illegal coal mining cases.
After arresting a BSF officer Satish Kumar and businessman Enamul Haque, CBI had reportedly come to know about Mishra, who enjoys Z-Category security from the state governement.
Last month, the central agency carried out search operations at three locations related to the TMC youth leader – at his homes in south Kolkata’s Rashbehari and Behala and his office at Lake Town in the eastern fringe of the city.
The Income Tax department had also raided his office and flats last week. The agencies are also investigating if Mishra had any link with the coal-smuggling case as the CBI also conducted search operations related to it on Thursday.
The raids in connection with coal corruption were run in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. The agency also had a search operation at Howrah’s Slakia and North 24 Parganas’ Konnangar.
The CBI had done a preliminary enquiry which showed that cattle smuggling was rampant along the India-Bangladesh border which is allegedly aided by some corrupt officers of the BSF and Customs receiving illegal gratification from smugglers, they said.
The agency has gone full steam on the cases related to West Bengal with Director RK Shukla asking the team probing Saradha and related ponzi scam to complete filing of all the FIRs before January, 2021.
In November last year, the CBI had raided 45 locations across West Bengal, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar relating to illegal mining and theft of coal from Eastern Coalfield Limited (ECL). The agency alleges a large scale corruption in ECL with the involvement of security and railway officials.