india

Updated: Dec 20, 2015 11:20 IST

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has junked Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s claim that an officer from the agency told him about an alleged directive to target opposition parties who do not fall in line and asked him to disclose the person’s name.

“This is a completely false, baseless and misleading statement and emphatically denied,” the agency said in a statement issued to the media and uploaded on its website www.cbi.nic.in on Saturday. “We urge the person concerned to name the alleged CBI official so that further process as per law can be initiated,” the statement read.

The statement said: “CBI strongly denies a statement/ news item published/telecast in certain sections of the media attributed to the CM Delhi that ‘A CBI officer told me yesterday that CBI has been asked to target all opposition parties and finish those who do not fall in line’.”

The CBI’s reaction was against Kejriwal’s Friday tweet. “A CBI officer told me yest that CBI has been asked to target all opp parties n finish those who don’t fall in line,” Kejriwal tweeted.

“It appears to be a part of a concerted attempt to malign India’s premier investigating agency,” said CBI spokesperson Dev Preet Singh. A Kejriwal aide declined to comment when contacted by HT.

Kejriwal’s tweet was ‘retweeted’ 1, 618 times and ‘liked’ 1,170’ till Saturday 7.08 pm on the online social networking site Twitter.

Kejriwal’s comment was part of a series of tweets by him since Tuesday morning when the CBI searched the offices of his principal secretary IAS officer Rajendra Kumar and booked him for allegedly favouring a private firm in getting five government contracts worth ` 9.5 crore during 2007-14.

Kumar was questioned for several hours on Saturday, the sixth time since Tuesday.

The agency’s FIR registered on Monday had named, apart from Kumar, private fir m Endeavour Systems Private Limited and its directors Dinesh Kumar Gupta and Sandeep Kumar, managing director of a public sector unit, Intelligent Communication System India Limited, RS Kaushik and the latter’s ex-managing directors AK Duggal and GK Nanda. The PSU was not named as an accused.

The agency has also questioned Gupta and Kaushik.