Unravelled Bothra

Bhubaneswar: Arun Bothra, IPS. ADG, CIDCB, Odisha. The 1996-batch IPS officer Arun Bothera, is currently serving as the Additional Director General of Police of the Criminal Investigation Department – Crime Branch (CID-CB) as well as Transport Commissioner. He is an extraordinary IPS officer, who has taken all the tuff cases of the State. The Odisha Government has superb faith on Bothra and handed over all the controversial and tough cases to him.

Bothra, who hails from Rajasthan, is given credit for solving the brutal murder of ‘Pari’, who was found in a gunny sack near a pond. The case had snowballed into a political embarrassment for the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD government after it was alleged that prime suspect Babuli Nayak had close ties with minister Arun Sahoo.

The victim’s parents had attempted self-immolation in front of the Odisha Assembly and accused Sahoo of protecting Nayak from arrest for five months. The Opposition BJP and Congress had staged protests, seeking dismissal of Sahoo and arrest of the accused. While the Nayagarh district police had failed to trace the killer, political pressure forced the state government to set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) led by Bohra. In less than two weeks, Bothra’s team managed to trace the killer and unearth the motive. The accused, an 18-year-old college student and the victim’s neighbour, had allegedly attempted to rape the child and strangled her to death when she tried to raise an alarm. He then dumped her body near the pond, the SIT found.

Despite the youth’s arrest, the dead girl’s parents and the Opposition BJP have demanded a CBI probe in the case.The student was arrested, he had accused Bothra of offering him Rs 5 lakh to admit he had killed the girl.

Bothra is also credited with cracking another sensational murder case – the Patnagarh parcel bomb case – in 2018. A newly-married engineer and his grandmother were killed while opening a gift parcel they had received by courier. The two died in the blast after the parcel containing a bomb exploded. The engineer’s wife had received serious injuries. A probe team led by Bothra arrested a college lecturer, Punjilal Meher, who had sent the bomb in the parcel to avenge his replacement as the college principal by the engineer’s mother. Now the recent Odisha Health Minister Naba Kishore Das murder case is also under the super cop Bothra.

While serving as a police officer, Bothra has also been in charge of Odisha State Road Transport Corporation (OSRTC) as its CMD. As the managing director of Capital Region Urban Transport (CRUT), Bothra is credited with making the city bus service, called Mo Bus, in Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Puri comfortable and dependable, with ridership rising constantly. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs declared this bus service as the Best City Bus Service Project in 2019.