Madhubani police have arrested five persons including a nurse in connection with the heinous murder of RTI activist and journalist Buddhinath Jha alias Avinash Jha. He was found dead yesterday after he went missing four days ago.
“Madhubani police have arrested five persons and they are being questioned. Very soon police will disclose details of suspects and the motive of the crime,” Benipatti SDO Ashoka Mandal told the Opindia. Sources told OpIndia that nurse of a clinic and four others have been arrested.
But local residents are quite furious over Madhubani SP Dr. Satyaprakash terming his murder as a fall out of a love affair that gone wrong. “Medical mafias killed my brother now police and SP are doing character assassination of Avinash that there was a love angle involved in this case. Whom Madhubani SP and his police are serving? We ask Madhubani police to at least read the FIR. We have named some nursing homes we doubt,” his brother Trilok Nath Jha told OpIndia.
In the morning today a large number of people hit the road at Benipatti along with banners and placards. Demanding justice for Avinash Jha, they blocked the road. Local BJP MLC Ghanshyam Thakur and others joined the protest. They accused Madhubani SP of allegedly diverting the case.
Protesters, later on, submitted a memorandum to the SDO office and demanded SP to tender an unconditional apology for making it a case of a love affair. “People have no trust in the police and we feel that Madhubani police are trying to save medical mafias. Avinash Jha had no enemy except medical mafias against whom he was speaking and acting. As an RTI activist and journalist, he was regularly writing against illegal activities of nursing homes in Benipatti. We demand a high-level investigation of this matter,” said Abhishek Jha a local resident.
Lalit Kumar Jha, a local journalist, said that the Madhubani police have not yet properly secured the spot for the forensic analysis where his dead body was found. The SSP did not respond to repeated phone calls.
A native of Benipatti block of Madhubani district in Bihar, Avinash Jha was last seen on the night of November 9 while speaking to a person over the phone. His half-burnt body, tied and packed in a sack, was found under a peepal tree in the Uren village near Benipatti-Basaith highway number 52 on the night of Friday, November 12.
He had been continuously raising the issue of the private hospital mafia and trying to expose the mafia operating fake medical clinics in his district. Therefore, his family alleges that he has been killed by this private hospital mafia. In fact, before the body of Avinash Jha was found, his brother Chandrashekhar Kumar Jha had filed a kidnapping case with the police, where he had named several hospitals and nursing homes. Chandrashekhar said that his brother was trying to bust the nexus of private hospital operators, staff and authorities scamming the people of the district, due to which he was on the radar.
Avinash Jha had recently exposed several ‘fake’ medical clinics, which had led to the closure of some of the clinics, and some others had to pay heavy fines. While exposing the clinics, Jha har reportedly received threats and offers of bribes to not pursue the matter. Two days before he went missing, he had named several private hospitals on Facebook.
