New Delhi: CBI special director Rakesh Asthana on Wednesday claimed before the Delhi high court that the FIR lodged against him on bribery allegations was a backlash to complaints of criminal misconduct by the probe agency’s chief Alok Kumar Verma.

Mr Asthana also said that prior approval from the competent authority is mandatory to initiate probe against a public servant which was not taken in this case.

He further said that the CBI avoided this issue in its response filed earlier to his petition seeking quashing of the FIR against him.

Mr Asthana made these claims in his rejoinder to CBI’s response to his petition.

The rejoinder was filed before Justice Najmi Waziri who extended till November 28 its order asking the CBI to maintain status quo on proceedings against Mr Asthana. Mr Asthana also claimed that the FIR was ante-dated and the question of merits of the FIR cannot be looked into as it was registered whilst showing complete disregard to the statutory procedure. He said the statement of complainant Sathish Babu Sana was recorded under section 164 CrPC on October 4 and after 11 days, without obtaining the mandatory prior approval under section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act, the FIR was purportedly registered on October 15 at 8 PM.

Sana had alleged to have paid bribe CBI officials to settle a case involving meat exporter Moin Qureshi. The FIR reached the concerned magistrate only after 51 hours of the registration of the FIR on October 17 at 11:51 PM, the rejoinder stated.

“This goes to show that the FIR was ante-dated. This was done to firstly defy the legal and binding directions of the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and was also due to the futile attempts of the respondents to extract a confession from Manoj Prasad (alleged middleman and accused) to falsely implicate the petitioner (Asthana),” he said.

He added that though the FIR has to be uploaded on the agency’s website within 24 hours, it was uploaded after five days on the night of October 21.