As mystery deepens over the disappearance of Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) founder V.G. Siddhartha, a fisherman on Tuesday claimed that he saw a man jumping into the Netravathi river from a bridge near Mangaluru on Monday evening.
"When I heard a thud-like sound in the river, I turned and saw the same man in the water struggling to float but drowned by the time I could reach the spot. As the current was strong, I could not find him in the fast-moving water, as the river is almost full and deep," Symond D'Souza told the police.
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Siddhartha, 60, the elder son-in-law of senior BJP leader S.M. Krishna, was last seen near a bridge across the Netravathi river in the Kotepura area in Dakshina Kannada district on Monday night.
According to police, the man who the fisherman saw jumping off the bridge is likely to be Siddhartha as he went missing from the same spot as per a complaint filed by his driver.
Siddhartha had left from Bengaluru to Sakleshpur in Hassan district Monday afternoon, but on the way he had asked his driver to go towards Mangaluru.
At a bridge near Ullala, he got down from the car, asked the driver to wait, walked towards the bridge and never returned.
Teams of National Disaster Response Force, Coast Guard, Home Guard, fire services and coastal police are scouring the waters under the bridge across the swollen Nethravathi.
Cops leave for Bengaluru
Mangaluru Police Commissioner Sandeep Patil on Tuesday said a police team had left for Bengaluru to conduct an inquiry and question office staff and relatives.
Patil said the team that had gone to Bengaluru would conduct an inquiry of the office staff and relatives and gather all information.
'Harassment from I-T officials'
In a letter to the CCD board and staff, Siddhartha had alleged there was a lot of harassment from the previous DG of the Income Tax Department in the form of attaching "our shares on two separate occasions to block our Mindtree deal and then taking position of our Coffee Day shares, although revised returns have been filed by us (sic)".
"This was very unfair and has led to a serious liquidity crunch," the letter, bearing a purported signature of Siddhartha, said. The department, however, has refuted the charges.
With inputs from PTI
