On Sunday, the 45-year-old wife of a Gujarat cadre Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer died at Gandhinagar’s Civil Hospital. She succumbed a day after she allegedly consumed poison outside her husband’s residence.
Police said the woman, who left her spouse months back, was reportedly involved with a gangster from Tamil Nadu’s Madurai known as High Court Maharaja. She allegedly leveraged their shared regional connections and criminal network to solve land disputes and extort money, they added.
Days before her death, the woman was allegedly involved in the abduction of a 14-year-old boy in Madurai. The abductors used an autorickshaw driver’s mobile phone to call the boy’s mother for ₹ 2 crore ransom. The mother alerted the Madurai Police, who rescued the boy within three hours.
Investigators found a group including Senthilkumar, a former police constable who joined High Court Maharaja after his dismissal from service, allegedly abducted the boy. Senthilkumar was arrested along with his accomplices Abdul Kader, Kaliraj, and Vairamani.
Madhurai Police formed special squads to arrest the IAS officer’s wife and High Court Maharaja as they managed to evade arrest. The woman, meanwhile, returned to her husband’s residence in Gandhinagar on July 22 as police were looking for her but was denied entry as the IAS officer was away to finalise their divorce proceedings.
{{/usCountry}}Madhurai Police formed special squads to arrest the IAS officer’s wife and High Court Maharaja as they managed to evade arrest. The woman, meanwhile, returned to her husband’s residence in Gandhinagar on July 22 as police were looking for her but was denied entry as the IAS officer was away to finalise their divorce proceedings.
{{/usCountry}}She allegedly consumed poison outside the house before someone called for an ambulance. Investigators recovered a note in Tamil from the woman purportedly addressed to Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin and the media suggesting her alleged involvement in the Madurai kidnapping case may have prompted her to take her life.
Virendra Kher, a local police officer, said the note referred to High Court Maharaja, who had borrowed ₹75 lakh from a financier in Madurai. “After Maharaja was jailed, the financer started pressuring the woman to clear the debt. According to the note, she sold her complex where she ran a restaurant and also her parlour but it was insufficient. She said she had to sell all her gold worth ₹10 lakh to clear the debt, but it was still not enough. She left for Bengaluru during this period.”
Kher said when Maharaja fled from jail, he and a few others planned the kidnapping. “The woman claimed in the note that she was falsely implicated in this and another case.” The note said she was unaware of the criminal background of Maharaja and got into a relationship with him about a year ago after they partnered in a business. “...she called her husband noble who took care of their children in her absence”. Kher said that the woman left her husband about a year ago and was living with High Court Maharaja in Madurai.
The police were investigating the source of the poison she consumed and whether the act was pre-planned, as well as who called for the ambulance.
The IAS officer, the father of two who had an arranged marriage with the woman about 20 years ago, refused to comment.