Jaipur police to seek Bitti custody

Arrested claims he is Raghav Rajan, not rape convict

A team of Rajasthan police will leave for Kerala on Monday to take into custody Bitti Mohanty for jumping parole while serving a seven-year jail term for raping a 26-year-old German student at Alwar in 2006.

Lal Kothi Station House Officer Sampath Singh said the team would go with a warrant seeking his custody. An FIR is pending against Mohanty at the Lal Kothi Police Station under Section 224 of the Indian Penal Code.

Mohanty, however, told the magistrate who remanded him on Saturday night that he was Raghav Rajan from Andhra Pradesh.  As such, the Kerala police will move an application on Monday seeking his custody to re-establish his identity, said police sources.

The Rajasthan police can seek Mohanty’s custody only after his identity is established, they added.

“Proving his identity will be a laborious and complex process. We have to seek the co-operation of our Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan counterparts for it,” said a member in the investigation team.

Bitti has been working as a probationary officer at a branch of State Bank of Travancore (SBT) in the town for the past one year in the name of Raghav Rajan. Before that, he did an MBA course at Chinmaya Institute of Technology in Kannur under the same name. It is believed that he had furnished fake documents both at the bank and the business school.

He gave the address at the time of joining the college as Raghav Rajan, Son of V Rama Rao, A – 7, Ground Floor, Saisri Conclave, Chitravathi Road, Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh.

 He also produced a degree certificate of BTech computer engineering from Kalinga Institute of Technology (a deemed university) in Cuttack, and a Class 12 certificate from Christ College. A man claiming to be his father was present at the time of his admission to the MBA course.

Fake documents

The certificates were found to be forged. Kannur University, which ratified his admission for the MBA course, however, accepted the documents without verifying whether they were genuine.

According to Alwar jail documents, Mohanty is an economics graduate.

SBT now admits that he had been appointed without police verification. Since it takes time, we give the posting to the appointed candidates without waiting for the police verification report, said a senior bank official.

Mohanty, then a 25-year-old former management student at a Delhi-based institute, was convicted for raping a 26-year-old German woman at an Alwar hotel in 2006.

She had claimed in her statement that Mohanty befriended her through a common friend when she came to India for a research project. Her visit to Alwar was part of her research and Mohanty had promised to arrange things for her using his influence. She and Mohanty had stayed in different rooms at the Hotel Ankur situated on Manu Marg in Alwar town. On the intervening night of March 20 and 21, 2006, the woman alleged that Mohanty raped her several times under the influence of alcohol.

The distressed woman sent a number of SMSes to a relative in Berlin who got in touch with the German Embassy in New Delhi which resulted in the arrest of Mohanty.

After being informed by the embassy, the police lodged an FIR on March 21, 2006. Mohanty was arrested when he was on his way to Delhi from Alwar in a train along with the woman at Kherthal railway station.

Since the rape victim was to leave for her country, the case was tried in a fast-track court. Mohanty was convicted of rape and sentenced for seven years on April 12, 2006.

After seven months, however, he applied for parole to meet his ailing mother and was given 15 days’ parole on November 20, 2006. But he did not return on completion of parole and had been on the run since. The senior Mohanty, however, did not utter a single word on the issue for the second consecutive day on Sunday when local journalists landed at the Cuttack residence of the former director-general of Odisha police. The former top cop was seen rushing out of his house and riding pillion on a motorbike driven by an unidentified person.