IAS official sent to jail on charges of sexual exploitation
The IAS official Vinod Katela was sent to jail by the district court on Tuesday for sexually exploiting a former Girls Hostel Superintendent at Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, reports Ejaz Kaiser.
An Indian Administrative Service (IAS) official Vinod Katela was sent to jail by the district court on Tuesday for sexually exploiting a former Girls Hostel Superintendent at Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh. The indicted official would remain in judicial remand till May 26.
Additional Commissioner (Revenue), Katela, evading arrest since 2005 when the arrest warrant was first issued against him by the court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM) Bilaspur, was taken into custody in Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh) by the Chhattisgarh police team led by DySP Shushil David on Monday. He was brought to Bilaspur and produced before the court of ACJM, Jitendra Kumar Jain in Bilaspur who sent the accused IAS to jail on judicial remand.
It may be noted that a former Schedule Tribe Girls Hostel Superintendent, Sharda Tiknu lodged a complaint at the SC/ST welfare police station at Bilaspur in 2000 alleging that she was sexually exploited repeatedly by Katela on the pretext of marrying her. Katela was additional collector in Bilaspur from 1998 – 2000. Though, she also claimed that they secretly married at a Ratanpur temple in Bilaspur then. Later Katela refused to meet her wish. On her complaint, a case was registered against the official under the Section 376.
Katela, shifted to Madhya Pradesh cadre, after the creation of Chhattisgarh state.
The police team, which went to Jabalpur with the arrest warrant, told Hindustan Times that the indicted IAS official even tried to dodge the Chhattisgarh police. "He refused to identify himself as Vinod Katela when he was trapped and we had to take assistance of the local police to ascertain his identity," said one of the police official. Incidentally, one of the members of the police team that went to arrest Katela also identified him as the police personnel was posted in Bilaspur when the official was additional collector.
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