Former CBI director Ranjit Sinha dies after testing COVID positive

Former Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) director Ranjit Sinha passed away on Friday morning in Delhi. He was 68.

He had tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday night, PTI reported.

Sinha, an 1974-batch IPS officer of the Bihar cadre, was the CBI director between 2012 and 2014.

He had also headed the Railway Protection Force and served at senior positions in the Central Bureau of Investigation in Patna and Delhi before his appointment as CBI chief.

Sinha’s tenure was easily the most tumultuous of a CBI director in recent years. He landed in one controversy after another in 2014. He also had a tiff with the Intelligence Bureau over the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case.

The 1974-batch IPS officer from Bihar was again in the news in 2014 when his wife sought to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Patna.

Sinha was also accused of influencing the probe in coal block allocation during his tenure as director of the probe agency. It was later revealed that suspects or representatives of firms that are accused in the 2G scam had allegedly visited his official residence dozens of times.

The coal allocation scam, or ‘Coalgate’ had engulfed the UPA government in 2012 after the CAG accused the government of allocating 194 coal blocks to in a flawed manner between 2004 and 2009.