“Tarun Vijay has been a journalist and he has been espousing many causes. It is a sad incident which happened. The investigations are on,” BJP leader Rajiv Pratap Rudy said here.
He also stressed that the decision of the police to quiz Vijay was “not an embarrassment” to the party.
Meanwhile, Union Minister of State for Personnel V Narayanasamy said he had received a letter from the Madhya Pradesh government and forwarded it to the CBI to look into the case. “I have just cleared the file and granted permission for a CBI probe into the case,” Narayanasamy told journalists.
Union Home Minister P Chidambaram had on Thursday said that he had not received any proposal from the State government for a CBI probe.
But the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh on Friday claimed that it had written to the Centre seeking a CBI probe on August 20 last. The State’s Home Minister, Uma Shankar Gupta, said he had sent the recommendation for a CBI probe to both the Ministry of Personnel and Ministry of Home Affairs of the Union Government.
Gupta also said his office had got acknowledgements of receipts of the letters sent to the Centre. Masood, a frontline campaigner for Jan Lokpal Bill, was shot dead outside her residence in Bhopal on August 16, the day Anna Hazare was arrested in New Delhi hours before he was set to launch a fast-unto-death stir.
The Madhya Pradesh Police has been probing the case over the past fortnight and claimed to have analysed Masood’s call records, which showed that she had spoken to Vijay, a Rajya Sabha member from Uttarakhand, not only the night before, but also the day she was killed.