Bangalore: Bangalore Police searched the hermitage of self claimed godman Swami Nithyananda and has launched an operation to arrest him.
Nithyananda is facing charges of rape and sexual harassment by some of his former devotees last year.
The state government ordered the closure of his hermitage and a search operation to find the absconding godman has been initiated.
The government had issued a high level enquiry against him on Monday.
District Magistrate Ram Reddy said they have recovered some electronic items from the hermitage.
"We have been able to find out some of the electronic items that have to be deciphered by computer technicians. Tomorrow computer technicians will be joining our team for further investigation. We have almost searched 10 rooms,” Reddy said.
Meanwhile, the Superintendent of Police of the Ramanagar District, Anupam Aggarwal, said that they have failed to find any clue about Nithyananda.
"Today at 5:30 pm we started the search operation and we were able to search only a part of the ashram. We could find out some of the electronic items, which were suspicious, especially hard disk. We could not find any clue about Nithyananda in those areas," Aggarwal said on Monday.
He added that they cannot arrive at a conclusion until they have searched the whole premises.
“No, we cannot say certainly about this because there are couple of other rooms, there were two or three entries to enter those rooms. So, till the time we complete our search process, we cannot rule out the possibility of him being here. We will continue our search operations,” Aggarwal added.
The godman`s disciples had summoned two news conferences last week to clear the air on the matter, but they ended in fracas as Nithyananda`s men assaulted the mediapersons. (ANI)
