“They have forgotten about my son. I am his father and I have to do everything in my capacity to bring him back,” says Pragya Sinha, sister of 29-year-old Bengaluru techie Ajitabh Kumar, who went missing on December 18, 2017, after he took his Maruti Ciaz car to a buyer he met on the online site OLX.
Over six months after Ajitabh went missing, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which is probing the case, has not found him yet.
Running from pillar to post, Ajitabh’s father - Ashok Kumar Sinha, approached the police and gave several representations to the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister’s office to ensure the case is investigated with priority.
TNM is in possession of three such letters. The Department of Home Affairs has also written to the Chief Secretary, requesting that Ashok Kumar’s request to hand over the probe to CBI be accepted.
“As considerable time has elapsed since the incident, it is requested that the matter may please be looked into. It is requested that the petition is looked into with priority,” the PMO’s letter to the Director General of Police, Karnataka, states.
Ajitabh’s sister, Pragya, says that the CID sleuths probing the case are waiting for things to fall into their lap. “It seems like they just want the circumstances to change by itself. We are not happy with the way the investigation is being conducted. They keep saying Ajitabh is a needle in a haystack. What hope do we have now?” she asks.
The progress so far
In late July, the CID had drafted a document for a formal request from Google seeking the details of a user with the email id Soulful Ramesh. The CID then forwarded the document to the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (ACMM) court in Bengaluru, where it was approved as a formal request to be forwarded to the CBI.
The CID sent the request to CBI’s Interpol wing. The central agency will now forward this request to the Union Home Ministry, which will send it to the Northern District Federal Court in California.
The details are being sought under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between India and the United States of America. The central agency has sought the email and chat conversations that Soulful Ramesh allegedly had with Ajitabh before he went missing.
Police sources say that the court-endorsed document has been forwarded and a reply from the federal court in California is awaited.