3 convicted for Satyendra Dubey muder

A special CBI court on Monday convicted three men of murdering Satyendra Dubey, a National Highway Authority of India engineer, on November 27, 2003. The court indicted Mantu Kumar, Uday Kumar and Pintoo Ravidas, residents of Katari village in Gaya district, about 97 km from here, as accused in the case, reports HT Correspondent.

A special CBI court on Monday convicted three men of murdering Satyendra Dubey, a National Highway Authority of India engineer, on November 27, 2003.

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The court indicted Mantu Kumar, Uday Kumar and Pintoo Ravidas, residents of Katari village in Gaya district, about 97 km from here, as accused in the case. The quantum of sentence will be announced on March 27.

The murder sparked protests across the country, as the 31-year-old IIT-Kanpur alumni wrote directly to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, exposing several cases of corruption in the 14,000-km-long Golden Quadrilateral project.

Dubey detected flouting of NHAI’s sub-contracting and quality control rules at the Kodarma and Gaya stretches of the project.

Dhananjay Dubey, Satyendra’s brother, said he was “really disappointed” since the three convicted people were “purely innocent”.

Claiming that it was simply a cover-up by the CBI to protect the culprits, he said, “The real culprits are still on the loose. The statement of the CBI is totally false.”

The CBI said Dubey, who was shot dead in front of the Gaya circuit house, had returned from Varanasi, and called his driver to meet him at the station.

He reached the Gaya railway station at three in the morning and found that his car could not come to receive him. Dubey then decided to take a rickshaw home.

But when he did not reach home, his driver went to look for him and found his body on a road in the city suburb.

According to the CBI, the accused robbed Dubey and during a scuffle, Mantu Kumar shot him with a .315 country-made weapon.

A case was lodged against unidentified persons. On December 14, 2003, the state government handed over the case to the CBI, which registered a case against unknown persons.

The CBI arrested four persons, including Sharwan Kumar, who later turned approver, from different localities and filed a charge sheet on September 3, 2004. The CBI court framed the charges on October 2004.