Uttar Pradesh minister's aides threaten engineer

According to police sources here on Friday, the Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Minister of State for Tourism Vinod Singh along with some other armed goons stormed into the office of the engineer in Sultanpur town on Wednesday evening and allegedly threatened to kill him. The minister’s aides allegedly ordered the other employees in the office to leave and then locked it from inside.

The PRO, Anil Singh allegedly put a revolver on the temple of the engineer Rajeev Kumar and warned him of dire consequences if the latter did not heed their diktat, according to the sources.

A terrified Kumar, who is in-charge of the road construction division, rushed to the state capital to meet the PWD minister Naseemuddin Siddique on Thursday and apprised him of the matter and sought security for himself and his family. The minister’s assurances,  however, failed to have any effect on the engineer, who proceeded on a long leave, PWD sources revealed. Taking a serious view of the matter, the government directed the police to act swiftly and book the culprits.

The police in Sultanpur, about 135 km from here, lodged an FIR against Anil Singh and five other supporters of the minister late on Thursday night, sources said. Four of the accused have been taken into custody, police said. On being contacted, the minister denied that he had any thing to do with the incident and demanded that the culprits should be brought to the book. Only a few months back a PWD engineer in Auraiya district, M K Gupta was brutally beaten to death allegedly by the  ruling party MLA Shekhar Tewari and his supporters after he refused to pay a huge sum of money demanded by Tewari for chief minister Mayawati’s birthday bash.