Rajasthan ACB Arrests SOG Officer Over Rs 2 Crore Bribe Demand
Rajasthan ACB arrests SOG Additional SP Mukesh Kumar Soni after a middleman was trapped accepting a Rs 2 crore bribe in the Udaipur plot scam case.
The Rajasthan Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has arrested an Additional Superintendent of Police with the Special Operations Group (SOG), the state's elite police unit, in connection with an alleged Rs 2 crore bribe demand.
Mukesh Kumar Soni, posted in Udaipur, was taken into custody from his residence in Balotra district after investigators found his role suspicious. His arrest came a day after the ACB trapped an alleged middleman, Sajjan Kumar, who was purportedly accepting the money on Soni's behalf.
The case relates to a demand for a bribe in exchange for filing a closure report in the Udaipur Municipal Corporation's 272-plot scam and for the release of seized goods. A court has remanded both Soni and the middleman to three days of custody.
The ACB said a case will be registered under Sections 7 and 7A of the Prevention of Corruption Act and Section 61(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
The arrest has renewed attention on past controversies involving Soni. One of these concerns the alleged suicide of Manohar Lal Bhadu, a 35-year-old history lecturer who jumped in front of a train near Arjun Nagar Phatak in Jaipur on February 4.
Bhadu, appointed in 2021, had been suspended amid an investigation into irregularities in a recruitment examination. In a purported suicide note, he wrote that his name did not figure in an FIR registered at the SOG's Ajmer branch against a Grade-2 Hindi teacher, Ramesh Kumar, and that it was absent from the charge sheet even after Kumar's arrest.
Bhadu alleged that Soni, then the investigating officer, questioned several people detained during the proceedings about his identity, his financial position and his activities, and tried to extort money from him. He further claimed that after his transfer, Soni called the then investigating officer, Shyamsundar Bishnoi, and instructed him to implicate no one other than Bhadu, to drag him into multiple cases and to use intimidation. Bhadu wrote that he had been rendered unable to function and that the police had "intentionally" killed him.
The SOG ordered an investigation into these allegations at the time, but no action followed for several months.
Soni also faces allegations of weakening cases against drug smugglers in Ajmer, where he served as Circle Officer for Ajmer South. In 2022, the Rajasthan High Court ordered an inquiry against three police officers, including Soni, over the failure to conduct investigations properly.