Itanagar: Arunachal Pradesh government has tasked a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to find whereabouts of the missing 1998-batch IPS officer Mayank Sheel Chouhan, who has charged former Chief Minister Gegong Apang, two ministers, five Congress MLAs and IAS officers among 56 people in the Rs 1000-crore PDS scam in the state.
Chauhan heads the Special Investigating Cell (SIC) formed on the direction of Gauhati High Court in 2008.
The High Court had ordered the SIC on a PIL filed by Barman Antony and Domin Loya in June 2004 seeking probe into the multi-crore swindle of siphoning of food ration meant for poor through public distribution system(PDS).
The police officer went missing on Tuesday afternoon at Tippi in West Kameng district of the hill state when he was going to Tawang from Itanagar along with police inspector Mohan Kaye and constable Vikram Singh, both members of the court-ordered SIC.
The case of his disappearance was handed over to the SIT by the state government on Friday after police failed to locate him, official sources said.
The sources said Chouhan, after getting dropped at Tippi market, had asked his junior colleagues in the SIC to wait for him at a nearby river where he would join them for lunch. The two cops waited for long for Chouhan’s return, but he did not turn up. When they tried to contact him on his mobile phone they found the instrument was lying in the vehicle in which the threesome were headed for Tawang.
The duo then lodged a missing complaint at the Bhalukpong police station in the evening. (UNI)