Two more former land officers held in Lalita Niwas land case

By A Staff Reporter,Kathmandu, July 12: Police have arrested two more former employees of the Land Revenue Office, Dilli Bazaar, in connection with the Lalita Niwas land scam.

Former employees of the Office, Yograj Poudel and Narayan Raj Mishra, were taken into police custody early on Tuesday for allegedly forging government documents to transfer the ownership of the government land as a private one located at the Lalita Niwas, said Central Investigation Bureau.

Poudel is a non-gazetted first-class officer while Mishra is a second-class officer.

According to Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Dinesh Acharya of the Bureau, Poudel and Mishra of the Office were arrested on the charge of creating a fake file to claim government land and submitting it to Chief Land Revenue Officer Kaladhar Deuja through Poudel by misinterpreting the decision of the then Cabinet meeting. 

The fake file prepared by them was approved by Kaladhar Deuja. Deuja is a former Joint Secretary, who had also been arrested but later released due to court's stay order. 

CIB claimed that Deuja took the land as a bribe from the then Rana family in order to make the land private.

With this, the total arrestees in the scam reached 14 as of Tuesday.