Forest officer kills self, blames colleagues, scribe

A divisional forest officer committed suicide at Kelapur, Yavatmal, on Monday. He left behind a suicide note, blaming five of his colleagues and a series of news reports, published in a small-time local daily, for forcing him to take the extreme step.

Gopal Kale, 50, consumed insecticide at his Pandharkawda home. His wife was away attending her ailing mother in Hyderabad, the Yavatmal police said. No arrests had been made.

The police said that they were waiting for Kale’s wife and son, who studies at Aurangabad, to reach Pandharkawda. If the two could give them more information, it would be easier for the police to make their next move.

Kale had acted against the recent forest encroachments in Yavatmal, district collector Sanjay Deshmukh said. “He took stern action against some people who had encroached on forest land with the intention of getting it regularised under the traditional forest-dwellers’ (recognition of right to forest) Act,” he said. “He had the backing of the district administration.”

But local newspaper Sahasik carried a series of reports against Kale for his drive against encroachers. In his suicide note, Kale alleged that five of his colleagues were hand-in-glove with the paper’s editor, Ravi Kotamwar. DNA failed to contact Kotamwar, but came to know that two cases of alleged blackmail were pending against him in Wardha.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated case of defiling a statue of Babasaheb Ambedkar at Wani, Yavatmal, the police have made three arrests — two of them reporters of a local TV channel, and the other a local coal merchant.

The police arrested the three on Thursday. Pradhan said that the accused — coal trader Nasir Khan and TV channel reporters Rajesh Meshram and Nilesh Pargantiwar — had confessed to their crime. They have been kept in police remand up to February 25.