Twelve Trinamool Congress leaders including Mukul Roy and Madan Mitra have been booked by the CBI for alleged criminal conspiracy and corruption in the Narada sting case wherein they were purportedly filmed while taking money.
The CBI registered the FIR under charges of criminal conspiracy and provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act dealing with bribery and criminal misconduct against the TMC leaders including sitting MPs and West Bengal ministers besides one IPS officer, the CBI spokesperson said on Monday.
The maximum sentence for these crimes range from five to seven years of imprisonment.
The TMC leaders booked by the CBI are Rajya Sabha MP Mukul Roy, Lok Sabha MPs Saugata Roy, Aparupa Poddar, Sultan Ahmed, Prasun Banerjee and Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, CBI sources said.
State Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim, Transport Minister Suvendu Adhikari, Environment Minister Sovan Chatterjee, Panchayat Raj and Rural Development Minister Subrata Mukherjee are also named in the FIR, they said.
Former minister Madan Mitra, MLA Iqbal Ahmed and IPS officer Saiyaad Mustafa Hussain Mirza have also been made accused by the CBI for the alleged crime, they added.
The sting operation pertains to the secret filming of the TMC leaders while they allegedly accepted money from the representatives of a fictitious company for extending favours to it.
The tapes, broadcast on a portal Naradanews.com just before the Assembly elections last year, prompted the BJP to launch a scathing attack on the Mamata Banerjee-led government during the polls. The Calcutta High Court had ordered the CBI to carry out a preliminary enquiry over the tapes.
The order was challenged by the West Bengal government in the Supreme Court which refused to provide relief in the order on 17 March and gave the CBI one month to file an FIR, if required.
The sting operation was purportedly carried out nearly two years before it was published and was supposed to be published in a magazine where Samuel was working.
During the preliminary enquiry, the CBI had taken detailed information from Samuel quizzing him for nearly five hours at the agency's headquarters on 6 April.
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