Sunday 1 June 2008

UN peacekeeping dollar salaries attract cops

By U Sudhakar Reddy
Do all cops going out to war zones abroad as part of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force spurred by the motto to serve?
The buzz is that they make huge bucks and taxfree ‘white’ money. Many of them, who are in loop line posts, opt to go out on United Nations missions to get paid in dollars.
In Kosovo, a peacekeeping officer is paid $92 a day and in Sudan and East Timor around $120. On an average, an officer earns $3,000 a month and can take home $2,000. The salary paid is regardless of the ranks.
Hence, IPS officials, deputy superintendents and inspectors of police also visit war-ridden zones to work for a few years.
Interestingly, some of them fail to make it as they flunk the test for English ability. Police officials, who stay in the loop line for years, are opting to move out to pursue higher studies.
For example, Ms Anjana Sinha, deputy inspector general of police, Special Protection Force, was in the loop line in the Congress regime.
Now, she has enrolled for a two-year postgraduate programme in public policy and management at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore. The cost of the domestic component of the programme, which is around Rs 2.5 lakh, will be borne by the home ministry and the state government will meet other costs.
It all went wrong for Ms Sinha when she was the west zone deputy commissioner of police.
She was involved in a controversy over nonsurrender, on record, of the seized weapons of the aides of the slain Telugu Desam leader, Paritala Ravi.
Since then she has been in loop line posts such as the Women Protection Cell, the Andhra Pradesh Police Academy and the Special Protection Force.
Meanwhile, the murder case, which dented the image of the state police, still haunts them though they managed to arrest a suspect, ‘Laddu’. Did cops lay hands on the wrong man in the Ayesha Meera murder case?
However, they, are divided over his arrest as some officers believe that the Vijayawada police laid their hands on the wrong man by relying on ‘footprint’ evidence.
Under pressure and to ward off criticism, the police resorted to the arrest of Laddu though the DNA fingerprinting, handwriting and a lie detector test showed that he was not the killer.
The Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory experts told the Vijayawada police that they were not sure that the footprint could be taken as strong evidence to nail him.
The Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory report on footprint, analysed from a photograph, said there could be similarity in the deformity of a toe.
A B.Pharma student, Ayesha Meera was killed in her hostel at Ibrahimpatnam in Vijayawada a few months ago.
The arrest took place after the new commissioner of police, Mr K.V. Rajendranath Reddy, took over from Mr C.V. Anand. Some of the officers of the Crime Investigation Department team, who took part in the investigation, are not satisfied with the manner in which the arrest took place.
Meanwhile, Laddu and his family members claim that they are innocent.

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