Govt probing terror money link with IPL spot-fixing

Senior govt official said lid on spot-fixing in IPL was blown when police was tracking some leads on terror financing

The government’s investigating agencies are looking into the link between terrorism-linked money and spot-fixing in the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket scandal.

"The spot-fixing revelation is incidental to the broader investigation into terror money coming into the country," a senior government official said today.

The official said the lid on the IPL scam was blown when the police was tracking some leads on terrorism financing. It started with police and security agencies looking into specific information on this and in the process came across the element of cricket spot-fixing.

The terrorism link, he said, was a serious, much bigger issue. "Links between terrorism and cricket betting has been established. We will come to know more details once the chargesheets are filed. It is still far too early to say who all are connected," he said.

Delhi Police busted the IPL spot fixing racket with the arrrest of three players of the Rajasthan Royals team. Later, the Mumbai Police joined in and arrested actor Vindoo Dara Singh and Chennai Super Kings’ G Meiyappan.

Talking about a broad range of issues, the official said two days after Naxalites struck in the Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, killing 27 people, mostly Congressmen, government officials said today the attack was intriguing as the state government was given adequate intelligence inputs that Naxalites were planning to make a "big strike". Though a senior government official did not name anybody, the signal was clear: that the BJP government in the state failed misearbly on taking adequate action.

Pointing out that a judicial review of the "horrendous incident" will begin soon, the official said it was too early to jump to any bigger conclusion. The focus now is to deal with the immediate issues of giving relief to the distressed families, he said.