Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh government on Tuesday removed the state’s Special Task Force Deputy Inspector General of Police (STF DIG), Anant Deo, amid a raging controversy over a letter purportedly written to him by slain Dy SP Devendra Mishra alleging a nexus between gangster Vikas Dubey and suspended Chaubeypur police station in-charge.
A government release issued here on late Tuesday night said that Deo has been transferred to Provincial Armed Constabulary, Moradabad.
Anant Deo, now a deputy inspector general of police, was Kanpur’s senior superintendent of police when the letter was allegedly sent to him by the slain police officer.
However, the police said that there was no record of the letter, which surfaced on social media, at the SSP’s office or other offices. Moreover, they would probe into the matter.
Lucknow Range IG Lakshmi Singh has been assigned the probe which has already started.
On Tuesday morning, Anant Deo had told PTI that the signature on the letter does not match that of the slain officer. The letter carried no serial number or date.
In the letter supposedly written in March, Dy SP Mishra had accused Chaubeypur police station in-charge Vinay Tiwari of diluting the charges levelled in a case against the gangster.
Mishra was among the eight policemen who were killed in an ambush allegedly laid by Vikas Dubey at his village, Bikru near Kanpur.
Vinay Tiwari is one of the four Chaubeypur station policemen who were suspended after the attack, under the suspicion of informing Dubey about a police team that was on its way to arrest him.
Meanwhile, the government also transferred three other IPS officers, including Moradabad SSP Amit Pathak and Varanasi SSP Prabhakar Chaudhary.
The release said that the two aforementioned officials replaced each other and Commandant Sudhir Kumar Singh of Agra-based 15th battalion of PAC has been shifted to Lucknow as STF SSP.