Bhubaneswar, Nov 30 (PTI) Hours before the beginning of the winter session of Odisha Assembly, Congress Tuesday turned its gun at Minister of State for Home D S Mishra, whose sacking is being demanded by opposition parties accusing him of having close links with the prime accused of the Kalahandi woman teacher's kidnap and murder case.

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Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee spokesperson Manoj Mohapatra alleged that the minister, apart from being close to criminal elements has acquired huge landed property and owns assets worth Rs 100 crore.

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Calling the minister a ‘fake pilot', he said that Mishra had declared the value of his assets was Rs two crore during the 2014 Assembly elctions and in 2019 as Rs eight crore.

Mishra had said in a statement in October in the face of persistent demands that he had quit a high paying job as a pilot and had joined the people of his constituency Junagarh in Kalahandi district.

“We have evidences of the minister acquiring properties worth Rs 100 crore,” Mohapatra claimed at a press conference here and released a list 16 landed properties worth Rs 74.17 crore allegedly owned by the minister.

The list also included another plot of land in the name of his brother which costs Rs 3.96 crore.

The OPCC spokesperson also alleged that the minister had acquired the properties of over 200 dalits in his and relatives' names during the BJD regime.

"The state government should confiscate all these properties," Mohapatra demanded.

The Congress leader cited the instance of the expulsion of Gopalpur MLA Pradeep Panigrahi from BJD and his arrest by the police in a fraud case. His properties were probed by the vigilance department and the Enforcement Directorate.

“Why will the same yardstick not be used for the MoS Home? We demand that Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik orders for an audit into Mishra's assets and ensure that the Kalahandi teacher murder case is investigated by a High Court monitored special investigating team,” he said.

The woman teacher had gone missing on October 8 and her body was exhumed from the playground of the school where she taught 11 days later. The prime accused had fled from police custody in Bolangir where he was under detention and was later arrested.

The opposition parties are demanding the sacking of the minister for his alleged close relation with the prime accused, who was the president of the school's governing body.

When contacted, neither the minister nor the ruling BJD were available for comment on the allegations by the Congress.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)