ED books 2 IAS officers in Saharanpur illegal sand mining case

Lucknow/New Delhi, Nov 12 (IANS) The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday said that it has registered a case against two IAS officers and some others in connection to its probe into the Shahranpur illegal sand mining case.A senior ED official told IANS that the agencyhas booked Ajay Kumar Singh and Pawan Kumar, former District Magistrates (DM) of Saharanpur, on the basis of the CBI FIR registered on September 30 this year. According to the ED, Singh, a 1998-batch IAS, was posted as the Saharanpur DM between March 28, 2012 and February 12, 2014. He is now Secretary of the Khadi and Village Industries Board.Kumar, a 2008-batch IAS officer, was posted in the district between July 20, 2015 and August 6, 2016 and now holds the post of Special Secretary in the Housing and Urban Planning Department of the Uttar Pradesh government.According toED officials, Mohammed Wajid, son of former BSP MLC Haji Iqbal, is one of the beneficiaries who is named as an accused in the case. The other accused named in the FIR include Mehmood Ali, Dilshad, Mohammed lnam, late Mehboob Alam, Naseem Ahmad, Amit Jain, Vikas Agarwal, Mukesh Jain and Puneet Jain.The ED has also registered cases of money laundering against several senior IAS officers and politicians in the state in connection with the alleged illegal sand mining cases.
--IANS aks/ksk/