SHILLONG: Kolkata police chief Rajeev Kumar reached Shillong on Friday afternoon accompanied by top city cops and a legal adviser. Kumar was escorted by the Meghalaya police to a guest house in Oakland, barely 5km from where he will appear before the CBI on Saturday morning.

The police chief was whisked away in one of the two cars waiting at the Shillong airport after Air India’s 85-minute direct flight to the Meghalaya capital landed at 3.35pm. Kumar, who is accompanied by additional CP (1) Jawed Shamim and DCP (STF) Murlidhar Sharma, refused to speak to the media. Former Mizoram attorney general Biswajit Deb, now a Trinamool Congress observer, also accompanied him.

A crack CBI team, flown in from across the country, will question Kumar at its office located a few hundred metres from the city centre. The CBI team might be directly led by joint director (Kolkata zone) Pankaj Srivastava, and SP Partha Mukherjee (who filed the affidavit against Kumar in Supreme Court) while deputy SP Tathagata Bardhan will be directly in charge of framing the questions. “We will keep Delhi headquarters in the loop. They can always seek clarifications through us. The top brass in the capital is monitoring every development here,” said a CBI source.

The CBI questioning is likely to hinge on three important points. One, the raids and seizures made at Saradha headquarters at Midland Park (when Kumar was CP Bidhannagar ) immediately after Saradha boss Sudipta Sen and his aide Debjani Mukherjee went underground. Two, whether evidence in the form of a red diary and pen-drives (a document of a crucial cement factory deal is reportedly preserved in one of them) were deliberately suppressed and whether false and wrong evidence were placed before CBI by the now-defunct SIT.

