"My brother did not die of natural causes. He was murdered,” said an angry Mayank Tewari, brother of deceased IAS officer from Karnataka, Anurag Tewari.
Anurag Tewari, a Karnataka cadre IAS officer, who was working as a director of the Food and Civil Supplies Department in Karnataka, was found dead in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh in the early hours of Wednesday.
While the post mortem report stated that Anurag died due to asphyxiation, it was inconclusive with regard to the cause of asphyxiation.
“There are so many loopholes in what has happened. When my brother came to visit us on May 14, he told us that he had applied for a transfer and that he may get posted to Ballari soon. He always complained about how corrupt the officials in his department were. He told me that he had unearthed some information which would land a lot of important people in jail,” Mayank told TNM.
Anurag’s body was found on the road on Wednesday morning, near a guesthouse in which he was staying in Hazratganj.
According to Mayank, Anurag was sharing a room with another IAS officer, Prabhu Narayan Singh.
Mayank alleged that the series of events recounted to him by Singh did not match what others had said about Anurag’s movements that evening.
“When I spoke to Prabhu Narayan Singh, he told me that Anurag had had dinner with him at 9 pm. Prabhu said that he (Anurag) went to sleep at 10pm, but Anurag’s friends say that they spoke to him over the phone as it was his birthday. He was up till 1.30 am. The investigators are saying he went for a morning walk but Anurag sleeps late and has never gone for a morning walk in his entire life,” Mayank said.
Mayank alleged that when he went to the hospital where Anurag’s post-mortem was being conducted, he found that Anurag’s belongings were lying scattered in the backseat of an Innova car, and did not seem to have been catalogued. He said that someone simply pointed out the car to him and asked him to collect the belongings.
“There were so many people there and a lot of IAS officers from Karnataka had come to the hospital. I did not ask the man his name. I don’t know if he was an official but he pointed towards an Innova car and told me to go and collect Anurag’s belongings from there. His iPhone was missing. If I had paid more heed, I would have realized that sooner,” Mayank added.
Mayank also said that false information was being spread across the media, suggesting that Anurag had died of a cardiac arrest.
“He did not die of a cardiac arrest. When I was at the hospital, the doctors were saying that he died due to asphyxiation, but they were apprehensive of saying what caused the asphyxiation. It was like an open secret that he was murdered but no one wanted to talk about it. The doctors did not say out loud that he was murdered, but they definitely suggested that he could have been killed,” Mayank alleged.
Mayank said that Anurag had never spoken specifically of a Rs 2,000 crore scam, but had only mentioned large-scale corruption in his department.
“We don’t know about the Rs 2,000 crore, but he always said that there was corruption at high levels in his department. I don’t know how his relationship was with the Minister UT Khader, and if anyone suggests that he had informed us of this Rs 2,000 crore scam, then that is false,” Mayank added.
A Special Investigation Team constituted by Lucknow Police, reached Bengaluru on Friday afternoon to continue the probe.
The SIT is still looking for the eye witnesses who spotted Anurag’s body. The Lucknow police received a call at 6.10 am on Wednesday. A milkman had spotted Tewari and informed some hawkers on Meerabai Marg about it, who in turn called the police.
The police are also on the lookout for a biker who had spotted Tewari’s body and informed the Nahri Police outpost at around 5.45am. Constable Harveer Yadav from the outpost had then rushed to the spot about 500m away and took Tewari to the Civil Hospital. Tewari was declared brought dead at the hospital.