CBI will discuss Bofors papers with Arun Nehru, Arun Singh, Sundarji

Lieutenant General Hriday Nath Kaul, whose statement was recorded on Tuesday by the Central Bureau of Investigation's special investigation team probing the Bofors case, says he will meet with agency officials again later this week.

Tuesday's exercise, he said, lasted less than half-an-hour. Lt General Kaul was the chairman of the negotiations committee on defence purchases in 1986 when the $ 1.3 billion howitzer deal was struck with Bofors AB of Sweden.

CBI sources, meanwhile, sought to play down the questioning of Lt General Kaul and Lt General K B Mehta, stating that the two retired army officers had been requested to help the SIT in the investigation of alleged kickbacks in the gun deal.

The CBI will also speak to former ministers Arun Nehru and Arun Singh, former defence secretary S K Bhatnagar and General Krishnaswamy Sundarji, the army chief when the Bofors deal was struck.

Asked to confirm whether the details attributed to him in a national newspaper were correct, Lt General Kaul said, ''only to a certain extent.''

The newspaper quoted the general as saying that the Joint Parliamentary Committee, which investigated the controversial gun deal, had been misguided by General Sundarji that only the Bofors howitzer had the 'shoot and scoot' technology which could evade detection by Pakistani radar systems.

He also reportedly told the CBI that the Sofma gun made in France was on top of the army's list, followed by Bofors and other guns.

The CBI also asked Lt General Kaul who had offered him a bribe of Rs 25 million to endorse the Bofors gun. The general refused to divulge the name, stating it would not serve any purpose at this juncture.

The SIT, the CBI sources said, was back to the Swiss bank papers on Tuesday which had practically been decoded, barring identifying the locations where the money was siphoned off from Swiss bank accounts by the recipients before they were frozen at the CBI's request.