Varavara Rao arrested

Hyderabad-based revolutionary writer Varavara Rao was arrested by Maharastra police in Hyderabad on Tuesday, following raids on his flat in the city in a case relating to alleged conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A police team from Pune arrested the revolutionary writer after searching his house and the houses of his family members and friends including a journalist.

Varvara Rao was shifted to the government-run Gandhi Hospital for a medical check-up. He is likely to be produced before a court here before shifting him to Pune.

Accompanied by local police, the Pune police came to the apartment building in Ashoknagar in Hyderabad around 7 a.m. Dividing into two teams, they began searching the flats of the writer and the journalist. Their mobile phones were taken over by the police.

Special teams of Pune police, assisted by their local Telangana counterparts, also raided the flat of a senior journalist K.V. Kurmanath and T. Kranthi, a photographer in Hyderabad. Mr. Kurmanath is Mr. Rao’s son-in-law. They both live in separate flats of Himasai apartment building in Ashoknagar.

In June, police in Pune had allegedly recovered a letter mentioning a plan to assassinate Modi from the house of one of the five persons arrested in connection with the Bhima Koregaon violence.

The letter written by a person identified only as ‘R’ reportedly mentions a plot to kill the Prime Minister on the lines of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.