Senior ACB officer arrested along with forest dept official

Acting on a tip-off, the senior officers of the city police arrested Alankar Jha, Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Subhashish Chakraborty, a DSP of the Anti-Corruption Branch from a hotel in the Dunlop area of North 24-Parganas late Saturday night.

This is one of the major arrests after Rajpal Singh Kahlon, the then Kolkata Port Trust chairman, who was held a few months ago on bribery charges. This is also for the first time that a senior ACB officer has been booked under corruption charges.

The police said that Jha had been under suspension for the last 18 months for his alleged role in corruption when he was the director of Darjeeling zoo. It was also alleged that as a district forest officer (DFO) of Cooch Behar, he had misappropriated Rs 40 lakh. Woods worth a few lakh of rupees were also recovered from his car. 

He was posted as an officer on special duty (OSD) at Aranya Bhavan at Salt Lake before he was put under suspension on various charges of corruption. Since then, an inquiry was initiated by the state forest department against Jha. Later, the forest department handed over the case to Anti-Corruption Branch.

Chakaraborty, the DSP of the Anti-Corruption Bureau who has also been arrested by the city police, was assigned to investigate into the allegations. The investigating officers of the Kolkata police came to know that Jha allegedly bribed Chakraborty. However, the police got to know about this and started monitoring the activities of DSP Chakraborty and finally nabbed the duo from the hotel on Saturday. 

The investigating officers came to know that the duo is likely to meet at the hotel where the accused forest official would hand over a huge amount of money to the police officer. But the attempt was foiled as the Kolkata police officers caught the duo. A team of investigating officers on Sunday raided the Dunlop police quarter where Chakraborty lives and seized various documents from his residence.