If local residents and security guards are to be believed, the CBI raids at senior bureaucrat BK Bansal’s East Delhi residence following his arrest were nothing less than dramatic.
The two raids on Sunday and Monday, each lasting anywhere between 12 and 15 hours, had involved around 20 CBI officers, said residents.
On each of the two days, the officers arrived around 3 p.m. and left around 5 a.m., they said.
“Some officers would take positions at the front and back gates of the society, on the stairs leading to Bansal’s flat and on the upper floors. Around a dozen men would search the house,” said SR Batra, the secretary of the society’s RWA. The way they strategically parked their vehicles in and outside the apartment premises, it resembled “scenes from movies”.
“For the two women who rarely had visitors, suddenly finding themselves in a hostile situation and amidst a dozen persons would have had a psychological impact,” said Mr. Batra, when asked about his opinion of what compelled Mr. Bansal’s wife and young daughter to commit suicide.
No one, however, was able to say what transpired inside the closed doors of the flat during the raids. The CBI has clarified that they did not pressurise or humiliate the two women in any way.
“It maybe mentioned here that both the deceased were neither accused nor questioned or summoned in the ongoing investigation,” a part of their official statement read.
A senior police officer said that the questioning of the two domestic helps, who first discovered the suicides, has revealed that the mother and daughter appeared to be “feeling low” for the past few days.
But RB Mishra, a security guard there, said he did not get the same vibes when he saw the two women outside their flat on Tuesday morning.
A heated exchange had taken place immediately when the CBI officers had landed outside the apartment on Saturday. RB Mishra, a security guard, claimed that they had stopped the officers and demanded to know who they were before they would be allowed into a flat occupied by women.
“The officers initially claimed to be policemen, but refused to produce identity proofs. The guards then asked them to enter their names in the visitors’ register and it was then that the officers entered into an argument with them,” said Mr. Batra.
