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Closed-circuit television footage recovered from the Ram temple in Ayodhya shows at least five of the eight men arrested for the alleged theft of donated funds removing and hiding cash during the counting process.
Sources in Ayodhya police said thorough scanning of 45 days of footage from the temple’s Pilgrim Facility Centre showed five counting personnel removing bundles of notes and hiding them in their clothes or socks.
Meanwhile, the agency through which the counting personnel were hired has claimed that it did not scout for the men, and that these names were recommended for appointment by the State Bank of India where the donated money was deposited.
Sources said police have already searched premises linked to the accused seen removing donation money and recovered cash. Police have so far recovered nearly Rs 80 lakh.
Police registered an FIR on June 25 on a complaint by the Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust and arrested eight men: Avinash Shukla, Lavkush Mishra, Anukalp Mishra, Manish Kumar Yadav, Karunesh Pandey, Ramashankar Mishra, Ram Shankar Yadav alias Tinnu Yadav and Subhash Srivastav.
Tinnu Yadav is Trust general secretary Champat Rai’s former driver. Manish Yadav is Tinnu’s nephew. Sources said cash was recovered from premises linked to Anukalp Mishra, Luvkush Mishra, Avinash Shukla and Manish Yadav.
Sources said the Trust engaged around 50 people to count notes and coins dropped in various hundis at the temple.
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An officer said, “During the counting, five individuals can be seen whisking away bundles of notes from the pile, hiding them in their clothes or shoving it in socks. Searches at the premises linked to these individuals have already led to recovery of cash. Unfortunately, the temple does not retain more than 45 days of CCTV footage. So we cannot say with certainty for how long this theft has been going on.”
The police are now going through documents recovered from the premises linked to the accused to ascertain if any property or asset was acquired from the stolen money, the officer said.
“We are examining the various other ways that donation money was stolen from the temple. Even employees of the bank are under scrutiny,” the officer said.
Six of the eight arrested in the case were hired for the counting purpose by the State Bank of India through Sainik Securities, a Varanasi-based manpower agency.
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Speaking to The Indian Express, Gaurav Singh, the director of Sainik Securities, said his agency provides housekeeping staff to banks and other firms.
“We don’t provide banking-related manpower, but housekeeping staff. What a bank or firm uses the staff for is up to them,” he said.
He said that in the hiring for the Ram temple, the agency did not have the freedom to choose manpower.
“In this case, SBI gave us names of the people to be hired. We verified their credentials by examining their Aadhaar cards and processed the paperwork. These men have never worked with us earlier,” Singh said, adding that documentary evidence to the effect had been provided to the Special Investigation Team probing the case.
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Confirming this, a police officer said, “It only goes to show that the temple was being run through adhocism. It has also been pointed out in the SIT report. Several of the accused are related to each other or to a trust functionary. A large number of people appointed for counting of notes, apart from the accused, have also been hired in an ad hoc manner, because somebody was known to somebody. There was no proper vetting of individuals before hiring, nor was access control to the counting facility robust with proper checks and frisking.”
The officer said that bank officials were also under the scanner.
A questionnaire sent to SBI by The Indian Express on the claims of its vendor through which some of the suspects were hired did not elicit a response.
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