After a hectic Saturday, it was a quiet Sunday at the Goa Crime Branch with former tourism minister Francisco (Mickky) Pacheco still untraced. Mr Pacheco disappeared after faxing his resignation to chief minister Digambar Kamat on Saturday morning though he was supposed to be present at the Crime Branch for questioning over his alleged involvement in the mysterious suicide of his girlfriend Nadia Torrado.
A “lookout” notice was issued on Saturday for Mr Pacheco, 46, and airport authorities were also alerted. Though the police top brass is still saying that there is no case against Mr Pacheco and that his presence is required for throwing light on the case, department sources point out that hardly ever is a “lookout” notice issued when the person concerned is not a suspect. Sources also point out that the police must have come across some incriminating evidence against Mr Pacheco which was why he skipped questioning on Saturday. Another reason for his disappearance on Saturday might be the fact that if he had been arrested on the weekend, he wouldn’t have got bail till Monday. Family members of Nadia Torrado, meanwhile, continue to allege that they are being unnecessarily harassed by the police — they have been subjected to three rounds of marathon questioning, on Friday along with Mr Pacheco, on Saturday and on Sunday. It is still not clear what the Crime Branch is looking into though investigating officer Sunita Sawant said that they had kept “all angles open”. Nadia’s mother Sonia Torrado, who is a schoolteacher, looked exhausted after being interrogated for the whole day on Saturday. As she was being led to the waiting car in the evening, she seemed to have had enough of questions for the day. When informed that Mr Pacheco had resigned and that he was a missing, all she said was, “How does that affect us?”
Incidentally, Mr Pacheco’s resignation is the fourth instance of a Cabinet minister resigning or being dropped from the Digambar Kamat government. Transport Minister Pandurang Madkaikar was axed and PWD minister Ramkrishna Dhavlikar and finance minister Dayanand Narvekar had resigned for the sake of “party stability”.
Mr Pacheco is also not the first politician to resign over allegations of being involved with a woman. Around 20 years back Mr Dayanand Narvekar, who was the then Speaker, had to resign when he got mixed up in a big controversy when a woman working in his office at the Secretariat at Panaji had alleged that he had molested her. Mr Narvekar lost his Aldona seat in the Assembly elections a few months later in 1989. Incidentally he has regained the seat since then and is the current MLA of Aldona.