The case of missing Indian top police officer

On 1 October, Indian authorities made a sensational announcement: the former police chief of Mumbai, the country’s financial capital, was missing.

Parambir Singh, a high-profile officer with a swashbuckling reputation, had been elevated to head the 45,000-strong force barely two years ago.

Now, Mr Singh, 59, was unavailable at the office, his apartment in Mumbai, and his family home in the northern city of Chandigarh, some 1,600km (994 miles) away.

Even as the police launched a hunt to find one of their own, Mr. Singh’s family – his wife and daughter who lived with him in Mumbai and his son who is abroad – and his lawyers went silent about the officer’s whereabouts.

It all began in February with a fiendishly tangled whodunit involving an SUV full of explosives which were found outside the house of Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man. In the following days, the body of the alleged owner of the vehicle washed up in the sea near the city – the police later determined that he had been murdered and his body was dumped in the water.

Things turned murkier when a police officer is reportedly known to the dead man was arrested. Investigators believe Sachin Vaze, an assistant inspector with the elite crime branch, was part of plans to park the car with explosives outside Mr Ambani’s house and also in the murder of the vehicle owner. Mr Vaze has denied the allegations.

In March, Mr Singh was removed from his position and moved to head Maharashtra’s – of which Mumbai is the capital – home guards, a poorly-resourced force that assists the police. In Indian media-speak, Mr Singh had been “shunted” to a rather unglamorous department.