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A tailor suspected to be a serial killer has identified three more murders, taking his total count to 33 truck drivers over a decade. Adesh Khamra was not an easy man to break. It took Bhopal police over eight hours of intensive interrogation every day for nearly a week to get him to confess to the 33 murders.
But contrary to reports in The Times of India, Khamra was not arrested at gunpoint in the middle of the night inside a jungle at Sultanpur, UP, but tracked by Bhopal police in relation to two separate cases — one for loot and murder, and the second for a missing truck.
Bhopal (South) SP Rahul Kumar Lodha told ThePrint that the media reports got more than one thing wrong — Khamra didn’t “rapidly admit to murders” either.
“A hardened criminal like that isn’t going to just admit to what he did,” he said. “It was only after hours and days of interrogation and placing all the proof we had before him that he slowly, slowly began to admit to the murders.”
FM Arun Jaitley’s ‘meeting’ with Vijay Mallya: The newspapers Thursday were flooded by reports that fugitive industrialist Vijay Mallya, accused of defaulting on loans to the tune of Rs 9,000 crore, met finance minister Arun Jaitley right before he fled India to escape prosecution.
However, each headline offered a different take.
“Mallya stirs row with claim of meeting FM, then backtracks,” reported The Times of India, while The Indian Express read, “Mallya claims he met Jaitley before leaving and offered to settle, FM says false, I snubbed him.”
In an article titled “The Jaitlag”, The Telegraph declares, “Finance minister Arun Jaitley has confirmed that he met Vijay Mallya before the tycoon fled the country”.
Either way, the responsibility of whipping up the political firestorm lies with Mallya, and the press isn’t so sure about the facts.
Jaitley took to Facebook immediately after Mallya made the claim outside a UK court, denying any sort of formal meeting. He said Mallya’s statement was “factually false in as much as it does not reflect truth”.
The Telegraph notes, “It was only after Mallya had made the claim outside a London court on Wednesday that the finance minister issued a formal statement confirming the exchange and describing the absconder’s statement as ‘factually false’.”
Meanwhile, The Times of India presented an entirely new angle, writing, “Documents emerged to show that the fugitive liquor baron had accessed a second tranche of bank loans due to easing of norms despite being a defaulter” during the UPA’s rule between 2010 and 2012.
Members of the opposition took to Twitter to express outrage at the meeting, however brief it may have been:
Given Vijay Mallya’s extremely serious allegations in London today, the PM should immediately order an independent probe into the matter. Arun Jaitley should step down as FInance Minister while this probe is underway.
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) September 12, 2018
Why did the Finance Minister hide this information till now? https://t.co/KSR13ODOQx
— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) September 12, 2018
As with the Rafale scam and Choksi scam, this latest revelation by Mallya puts Modi govt in the dock. It is not the finance minister alone, we cannot be sure what other facts are being hidden even now. #Mallya #Modi #Scams
— Sitaram Yechury (@SitaramYechury) September 12, 2018
Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha, who quit the BJP earlier this year, said:
Not only the finance minister, the entire BJP must come clean on its relations with Vijay Mallya.
— Yashwant Sinha (@YashwantSinha) September 12, 2018
Someone on Twitter even dug out this old Tweet by BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, making matters appear murkier:
Mallya could not escape from India because of a strong Look Out Notice for him at airports. He then came to Delhi and met someone who was powerful enough to change the Notice from blocking his departure to just reporting his departure. Who was that person who dilute this LON?
— Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) June 12, 2018
Mallya’s statement came after a court set 10 December as the day India’s extradition plea for him will be decided. “There is an awful lot to go over The most important point is the prima facie case,” The Hindu quoted the judge, Emma Arbuthnot, as saying.
News it’s just kinda cool to know
It’s the loss of a gene, CMAH, that prevented human beings from becoming the animal world’s best long distance runners, researchers at the University of California San Diego, US, have said.
Business Class
There were no surprises as Apple released new products Wednesday. The company is relying on larger phone screens to increase its sales volumes in the face of sluggish growth for iPhones, reports Reuters.
Maruti Suzuki will relocate its Gurgaon plant, reports Business Standard. “The relocation of Maruti Suzuki’s plant in Gurgaon to a less inhabited area is inevitable, company chairman R.C. Bhargava said,” the report stated.
Point of View
BJP president Amit Shah said the killing of Mohammad Akhlaq, a victim of alleged cow vigilantes, has not cost the party any votes. In its editorial, The Indian Express criticises the BJP chief’s statement.
What makes a good policy? Senior Congress leader and former union minister Kapil Sibal, in a column in The Indian Express, says a good policy is one that takes into account the ground realities. “The failure of the NDA has been its inability to anticipate pitfalls in implementing policies,” he adds.
Prime Time
Vijay Mallya’s meeting with FM Arun Jaitley
On CNN News 18, the topic of discussion was fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya’s meeting with FM Arun Jaitley before the former fled India.
BJP spokesperson Narendra Taneja said there was no meeting between the two, but added nonetheless that Rajya Sabha members occasionally “keep meeting and greeting each other”. He added that Rajya Sabha members “occasionally say hello to each other” and that any meeting between Mallya and Jaitley should not be seen as a “controversy”.
The issue of illegal migrants
Aaj Tak anchor Anjana Om Kashyap held a debate on BJP chief Amit Shah’s statement that each and every “illegal migrant” who doesn’t make it to Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) will be sent back. Anjana asked whether the NRC was a “political move” of the Modi government.
BJP spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain countered the argument, saying “politics has been done by the UPA government”. Migrants have been used as a “vote bank” by the Congress, he added.
With inputs from Ratnadeep Choudhary