After the Chief Minister's 'messenger' Shaj Kiran refuted all charges against him, both Swapna Suresh and her lawyer Krishna Raj reiterated the original charge that Shaj was indeed the Chief Minister's emissary.
Swapna's lawyer said the audio recording of her conversation with Shaj Kiran will be released at 3 pm on Friday. "Once you listen to the audio clip, you can decide for yourself," Swapna told reporters on Thursday.
Swapna said it was true that Shaj "was and is a good friend of mine." She also admitted that it was she who called Shaj after Sarith went missing on June 8. "We had no personal differences till a day ago. And it was he who told us that Sarith would be picked up, and it happened," Swapna said. "But he had been torturing me mentally since afternoon (of June 8), forcing me to withdraw the 164 statement," Swapna said.
She said Shaj referred to the Chief Minister as "the number one". "He said that he was acting as the mediator and that he was going to meet the number one. He also said that the number one was angry," she said.
She said that while Shaj was with her, ADGP (Vigilance) M R Ajith Kumar and ADGP (Law and Order), Vijay Sakhare, kept calling him alternately on his WhatsApp. Together, they had called him 56 times, she said.
Swapna said Shaj told her that the "sound of the Chief Minister", journalist Nikesh Kumar, would call her. He asked me to hand over the phone to him. "This, he said, was to gather new evidence and not to dig up any old information," Swapna said. "He said this was also why Sarith's phone was seized by the Vigilance. He told me to just listen to what they say and do accordingly," she added.
Contrary to what Shaj said, advocate K Krishna Raj said that Swapna was introduced to Shaj by M Sivasankar as the director of K P Yohannan's Gospel for Asia. Shaj had earlier denied this charge. "She was also told that this person handled the foreign investment of Pinarayi and Kodiyeri," Krishna Raj said. Shaj had earlier told the media that he had been to Dubai just once and that he had no personal dealings with the Chief Minister or the CPM state secretary.
Krishna Raj said: "In that clip, Shaj can be heard saying that Yohannan had suffered some losses because he had handled Pinarayi's and Kodiyeri's foreign investments."
