The cash recovered from the three arrested Jharkhand Congress MLAs was delivered to them by a Kolkata-based businessman through hawala, a senior CID officer said on Tuesday. The CID raided the office of the businessman, identified as Mahendra Agarwal, just opposite the Kolkata Police's headquarters in Lalbazar and recovered Rs 3 lakh in cash, several bank passbooks and 250 silver coins, he said.
"The office was closed and the mobile phone of the owner switched off. In order to find out more about his activities, we conducted the raid," he added. Aggarwal went missing after the arrest of the three MLAs at Howrah's Panchla with over Rs 49 lakh in cash over the last weekend, the officer said.
The three MLAs — Irfan Ansari, Rajesh Kachchap and Naman Bixal Kongari — have already been suspended by the Congress, which alleged that they were a part of a conspiracy hatched by the BJP to topple its coalition government with JMM and RJD in Jharkhand. "All three MLAs, along with a mediator, had gone to Guwahati where a deal was struck with someone influential. The three MLAs then flew back to Kolkata and put up at a Sudder Street hotel," the CID officer said.
Efforts are on to trace the Youth Congress leader, he said, adding that they have already secured the CCTV footage of the hotel as proof of the activities that happened there. The Congress has also dragged in the name of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma in the alleged conspiracy, but these allegations were rubbished by the BJP, which claimed that the grand old party was trying to hide its own corruption after the cash was found.
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