Bhubaneswar: Nine tense hours and a frantic chase across the city. That’s what vigilance officials needed on Friday to intercept and apprehend a superintending engineer of the irrigation department and recover more than Rs 21 lakh in cash he had allegedly collected as bribe from contractors. He was arrested on Saturday.
Cash seized from the vehicle of engineer
The edge-of-the-seat operation started at 2 pm on Friday and ended around 10.30 pm. The accused engineer, identified as Prasanjit Das, was caught near AG Square in Bhubaneswar late on Friday in what vigilance officials described as a nine-hour-long cat-and-mouse chase involving constant changes of locations, vehicles and meetings aimed at evading surveillance.Acting on specific intelligence that Das had summoned contractors to the Jagatpur irrigation inspection bungalow (IB) and collected bribe money from them, vigilance teams launched a coordinated operation in Cuttack and Bhubaneswar. Officials monitored his movement throughout the evening, but the engineer repeatedly changed his location, making tracking difficult.Investigators eventually traced his mobile phone near Delta Square in Bhubaneswar and located him at the Delta Irrigation IB, where he was attending a dinner gathering. By then, he had already switched his hired vehicle. To avoid alerting the suspect, two vigilance officers in plain-clothes entered the IB and mingled with guests at the gathering while keeping him under close watch.After the party ended, Das reportedly boarded his official vehicle and left to meet another contractor. Vigilance teams continued tracking his movement and intercepted the vehicle near AG Square around 10.30 pm. During a search, officials recovered Rs 7.38 lakh in cash from his possession. The money is suspected to have been collected as illegal gratification from contractors.Simultaneously, another vigilance team rushed to Das’s residence at an apartment in Ghatikia, approximately 10 km away, and kept the premises under surveillance based on inputs that cash could be concealed there. Following confirmation of the recovery from the engineer, officials conducted a search of the apartment and seized an additional Rs 14.6 lakh in cash.Following the cash recovery, vigilance launched simultaneous searches at multiple locations linked to the engineer as part of an ongoing investigation into the source of the money and possible corruption in contract-related works.