IAS officer Sriram Venkitaraman was arrested by police on Saturday. (Source: Facebook/ASAP Kerala) IAS officer Sriram Venkitaraman was arrested by police on Saturday. (Source: Facebook/ASAP Kerala)

A first-class judicial magistrate in Thiruvananthapuram Tuesday awarded bail to suspended IAS officer Sriram Venkitaraman who was booked by the police on charges of killing a journalist in a case of an alleged drunk driving accident. “Bail application allowed”, the judge said, accepting the defence argument that there was no alcohol content in the blood sample of the accused.

Venkitaraman, who held the post of the chief of State Survey and Land Records department before his suspension by the government, is accused of ramming his car in an allegedly inebriated condition onto a bike driven by a journalist in Thiruvananthapuram early Sunday morning. KM Basheer, the city bureau chief of local Malayalam daily Siraj, was brought dead at the hospital.

Though Venkitaraman was arrested by the police and charged for culpable homicide not amounting to murder under Section 304 of IPC, he has spent his days nursing injuries initially at a private hospital and currently in the ICU at the Medical College Hospital.

There are reports that he was given bail as the prosecution could not prove the accused was inebriated at the time of the accident. Questions have been raised over the delay by the police in collecting blood samples of the accused and it’s overall handling of the case. In any case, the police had argued in court for the accused to be remanded in custody as he could influence witnesses.

Wafa Firoz, a female model who was Venkitaraman’s co-passenger in the car that night, has reportedly given a statement to the police that the IAS officer was drunk and driving the car recklessly. At the same time, a lawyer representing Siraj daily has requested the court to order Venkitaraman to be subjected to a dopamine test to find out if he had consumed drugs.

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