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It was like Irving Wallace's Almighty being replayed in Lucknow, where two crime reporters are in the dock for their alleged involvement in the brutal murder of a young man, whose decomposed body was recovered from a well in Bachrawam town, about 55km from the state capital, six months ago.
Simultaneously, the police claim to have solved the sensational murder of a third crime reporter, Paritosh Pandey, who was working for the one-year-old Lucknow edition of The Indian Express. While the key assailant in this case has been arrested, police have not ruled out the involvement of some journalists in the conspiracy. Pandey was gunned down at his house in April 2001.
While Ajay Shukla, a recently sacked crime reporter of a national Hindi daily, was booked for committing the murder of a parking lot contractor six months ago, Bishwadeep Ghosh, Kanpur-based correspondent of a leading English national daily belonging to the same group, was held on the charge of carting his body to a neighbouring town and dumping it in a well.
Shukla, son of a police inspector, was living in a government officers' colony flat, allotted to him as a journalist, even though he had been sacked by the Ranchi edition of the national Hindi daily for which he had worked for a while.
He had allegedly also been found running a gambling den in his house and was arrested earlier for attempted extortion from a shopkeeper in Lucknow's fashionable Hazratganj locality.
Deputy Inspector General of Police (Lucknow range) Arun Kumar told a press conference on Monday afternoon that "both journalists have confessed to their crime and are being charged for abduction and murder".
The victim, 28-year-old Manoj Dubey, was brutally done to death in March. His body was recovered more than a week later from a well.
Tracing the sequence of events, police said Dubey was picked up by Shukla from his home on the night of March 28 and abducted in front of the old Pioneer press building, where Ghosh and two other persons joined in to beat up the hostage.
After the man fainted, they loaded him into Ghosh's car and continued to hit him while the car was driven towards the Rae Bareli road. Shortly thereafter, they realised that Dubey was dead. They then proceeded to strip him and dumped his body in a well at a secluded spot by the roadside in Bachrawan town.
Dubey's father, Hari Shankar Dubey, who is a resident of Varanasi, lodged a report on April 5 that his son was missing. The Bachrawan police recovered the victim's highly decomposed body from the well on April 7. "The investigating team traced the identity of the deceased from the socks that were still left on his feet," the DIG said.
Working on a chain of clues, the police laid their hands on Shukla. Ghosh fell into the trap while trying to pull strings to bail out Shukla, who eventually blurted out the sequence of events.
In Pandey's murder, police have arrested Sanjay Pandey, who was known to the journalist and has also reportedly confessed to an intimate relationship with the reporter's estranged wife. But police have not ruled out the involvement of some journalists in this case as well.
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