SAI suspends videographer,orders probe

To a few of his colleagues at SAI Centre South,the scandal hasn’t come as a surprise. According to them,the pictures of the 50-year-old Basavraj in a compromising position with an unidentified female that appreared in newspapers on Wednesday have been circulating for a while.

They said Basavaraj,50,was in the habit of lavish spending. Basavaraj joined SAI Centre in Bangalore in 1992 as a photographer-cum-videographer. But with the centre becoming the hockey hub — almost all national camps used to be held in the Karnataka capital — he started accompanying the teams abroad. One of his colleagues said that there were occasions when Basavaraj had spent his money in order to travel with the team after his expenditures were not cleared by the government. “And we thought it was because of his passion for the game that he wanted to travel with the team,” he said.

“The clippings and pictures were doing the rounds here for about a month now. But he was always carefree. It eventually landed him in trouble,” said a colleague from Bangalore did not wish to be named.