A United States intelligence report, sent to the enquiry panel probing the disappearance of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, has corroborated the evidence provided by the Taiwan government that no air crash had occurred at Taipei airport or anywhere in that country on August 18, 1945, in which the Indian leader was supposed to have been killed.
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In response to a questionnaire sent by Justice M K Mukherjee Commission to several countries, the US administration said there was no aircrash in Taiwan on the day when Netaji was supposed to have been killed in a plane crash at Taipei's Taihoku Airport, Bose's nephew and Forward Bloc MP, Subrata Bose, told reporters in New Delhi.
He also said the Union Home Ministry, during the tenure of L K Advani, had refused to give two files to the panel pertaining to the reported 1945 incident on the grounds that the information, if disclosed, would affect India's relations with some friendly countries.
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He urged the United Progrssive Alliance government to provide those files to the enquiry panel.
Bose, who is part of an eight-member team accompanying Justice Mukherjee on a ten-day visit to Russia on Tuesday, said, "we do not hope that Netaji is alive. But why should we not know what had actually happened to the great leader. It is a right of the people of the country."
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Maintaining that there were reports in erstwhile KGB and Russian President's archives as also research articles that Netaji was "actually in Russia in 1946," he said the one-man panel's visit to Moscow, St Petersburg and two Siberian towns of Irkutsk and Omsk, would be "significant" in this regard.
Bose said the commission, besides going through the archival materials, would strive to confirm information given by "various persons from time to time" that Netaji was imprisoned at Irkutsk and Omsk.
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The panel would be holding hearings in these two Siberian cities as well as in Moscow and St Petersburg to ascertain the writings of several research scholars in this regard.
Earlier, the Taiwan government had officially stated that there was no crash in its entire territory on that day.
It had also given documentary evidence of the relevant crematorium that no one called Subhash Chandra Bose or Ichiro Okuda (a pseudonym given to Netaji by the Japanese government) was cremated during the period.
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There was also no such evidence about 4 other Japanese officials who accompanied Netaji on that aircraft which was supposed to have transported him to Manchuria for onward journey to the Soviet Union, Bose said.
Besides the Russian archival materials and research papers, there were evidences by two Indians, associated with the Indian National Army headed by Netaji, that one had met him at Omsk prison (and he also gave the prisoner number to the erstwhile enquiry panels) and the other claimed he had met Netaji in China.
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Following these instances, another Indian reseacher Purabi Roy, who is also travelling to Moscow with the enquiry panel, unearthed documents from KGB and the Presidential files referring to Netaji's presence in the Soviet Union at that time, the Forward Bloc leader said.
