Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was questioned for nearly nine hours by CBI in excise policy scam case, said Officials, reported news agency PTI. "CBI questioning was conducted for 9.5 hours. I answered all the questions. The entire alleged liquor scam is false and bad politics. AAP is 'kattar imaandaar party'. They want to finish AAP but the country's people are with us," said CM Kejriwal.
"Want to thank CBI officials for hospitality, they asked questions in friendly, harmonious manner," he added.
Before arriving at the Central Bureau of Investigation's heavily fortified headquarters at around 11 a.m., Kejriwal made the claim in a five-minute video message on Twitter that the BJP might have ordered the agency to arrest him.
After being summoned by the agency, the head of the Aam Aadmi Party said that he would answer questions honestly because he has nothing to hide and that he would receive messages of solidarity from a number of opposition leaders.
On Sunday, Sambit Patra, the national spokesperson for the BJP, stated that investigation agencies like the CBI and ED operate based on facts, not emotions.
This morning, Kejriwal went to the CBI office with his Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and a few cabinet colleagues. He also went to the Mahatma Gandhi memorial at Raj Ghat.
During a sit-in against his summons at Archbishop Road, several senior AAP leaders were "detained" while he was being questioned by the Delhi Police.
Rajya Sabha MPs Raghav Chadha and Sanjay Singh, Delhi ministers Saurabh Bharadwaj, Atishi, and Kailash Gahlot, AAP spokesperson Adil Ahmad Khan, AAP general secretary Pankaj Gupta, and a few Punjab government ministers were among the detainees.
"The Delhi Police has arrested us for sitting peacefully and is taking us to some unknown place... what kind of dictatorship is this?" Chadha tweeted.
"BJP suffers from chronic Kejriwal-phobia," he alleged.
Before the AAP leaders were detained, Mann, who also joined the sit-in, had left the location.
"Around 1,500 people have been detained or arrested by police across Delhi for staging protests. Thirty-two Delhi MLAs and 70 councillors have been arrested in the city and 20 Punjab AAP MLAs have been arrested at the Delhi border," AAP Delhi convener Gopal Rai claimed at a press conference.
In addition, Rai presided over an "emergency meeting" of officeholders to decide what the party should do next after its leaders were detained.
Kejriwal was taken to the first-floor office of the CBI's Anti-Corruption Branch, which is investigating the incident, after arriving at the agency's headquarters.
According to them, senior agency officials remained in the office on Sunday to monitor the situation, as is customary whenever a VIP visits the agency.
During the day, Kejriwal was offered a mid-day break and decided not to go external the CBI office, sources said, reported PTI.
The scrutinizing was all the while going on till 6.30 pm.
On February 26, officials said that AAP leader Manish Sisodia's answers were unsatisfactory after nearly eight hours of questioning in the case. On February 28, he left his position as Delhi's deputy chief minister.
"I have been summoned by CBI today and I will give all the answers with honesty. These people are very powerful. They can send anyone to jail, it does not matter if that person has committed any crime or not," Kejriwal said in his video message on Sunday before his questioning.
"Since yesterday, all of their leaders are screaming at top of their voices that Kejriwal will be arrested and I think BJP has instructed CBI also that Kejriwal should be arrested. If BJP has given an order, then who is CBI? CBI is going to arrest me," he said.
At Raj Ghat, workers and leaders of the BJP staged a protest in demand of Kejriwal's resignation.
When questioned regarding the CBI's action, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said, “Who is the kingpin of the Delhi liquor scam? Did Manish Sisodia solely make this excise policy on his own, or someone else is also involved in this?" At the press conference in Bhubaneswar, Patra also posed a few questions to Kejriwal.
“The Delhi liquor policy was passed by the cabinet on your instructions at your residence and time and again you have claimed this Delhi excise policy will bring huge benefits to the State’s treasury, but instead a loss of Rs 3,000 crore was incurred and you had to withdraw the excise policy," he said.
Kiren Rijiju, Union Law Minister, made the claim that the Aam Aadmi Party used Anna Hazare, an activist, to take power in the name of corruption.
Rijiju also shared portions of an unpublished interview with Hazare in which the activist was said to have voiced opposition to the Delhi excise policy.
"Now they have captured power I am sure they will not even listen to Annaji. Corruption was an excuse to fool Annaji and the people," he tweeted.
Earlier, as Kejriwal's questioning started off, top AAP leaders, including Mann, Saurabh Bharadwaj, Atishi, Kailash Gahlot, Sandeep Pathak, Raghav Chadha and Sanjay Singh accumulated close to the CBI base camp and raised slogans against the Prime Minister.
A number of AAP leaders, including ministers and MLAs from Punjab, claimed that they were prevented from entering Delhi.
Ministers Bram Shanker Jimpa, Balbir Singh, and Harjot Singh Bains, as well as MLAs Dinesh Chadha and Kuljit Randhawa, were, according to Punjab's ruling party, among those stopped at the Singhu border.
"We cannot even enter our capital? @DelhiPolice not allowing my car to enter Delhi," Punjab Education Minister Harjot Bains said in a tweet.
Traffic snarls were reported in numerous parts of the national capital during AAP workers' protests against the summons of Chief Minister Kejriwal.
According to sources, the agency had summoned Kejriwal on Friday in order to request his appearance as a witness before the investigation team in order to respond to their inquiries regarding the inputs generated during the investigation.
They said the CBI might get some information about the arrangement plan process, particularly the "untraceable" record, which was prior scheduled to be put before the Council of Ministers.
They claimed that the expert committee's and public and legal opinions on the file were not presented to the council and cannot be traced.
What Is The Case Against Kejriwal?
The Delhi government's excise policy for 2021-22, which grants licences to liquor traders, is said to have favoured certain dealers who allegedly paid bribes for it, a charge strongly denied by the AAP. The policy was later abandoned.
The Delhi chief minister has been summoned as a witness but is not a defendant in the excise policy case in which his former deputy Manish Sisodia was arrested by the CBI on February 26. Sisodia was arrested last month by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and is currently in judicial custody.