The CBI, which has phone intercepts running to several hours of conversations, will collect voice samples of the main accused persons in the cash-for-appointment case for speech recognition.
During the two-month long operation, the agency has recorded telephonic conversations purportedly between the former Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal’s nephew Vijay Singla, Railway Board Member (Staff) Mahesh Kumar and other accused persons besides a senior Railway Ministry official close to Mr. Bansal. The investigators would bank on these conversations to prove the circumstances in which the deal for Mr. Kumar’s posting as Railway Board Member (Electrical) was struck for Rs.10 crore.
The tapped conversations and the voice samples of the accused persons would be sent to forensic laboratory .
On May 3, when the CBI conducted the first round of searches in Chandigarh, Bangalore and Mumbai, the call records reveal that Mr. Kumar was in constant touch with some of the accused apparently to ensure that the money was delivered to them.
The agency has learnt that Mr. Bansal’s nephew had met Mr. Kumar at his residence in Chandigarh on a couple of occasions to finalise the deal. Investigations also revealed that some calls purportedly made by Mr. Singla also originated from the landline numbers of Mr. Bansal’s official residence in the Capital.
In the tapped conversations, there are no direct references to the proposed appointment of Mr. Kumar as Member (Electrical), but at several places the accused persons used code language to communicate matters which come under the purview of the present investigation.
