On January 5, Tapan Misra, senior adviser at the Indian Space Research Organisation, wrote on Facebook that he had survived an assassination attempt more than three years ago. On May 23, 2017, he said, he was given food laced with arsenic trioxide while attending a promotion interview at the ISRO headquarters in Bengaluru. “What followed was a nightmare lasting almost two years,” he wrote.
Misra fell seriously ill after he returned to his Ahmedabad office the following day and was rushed to Zydus Hospitals. He developed severe respiratory issues, skin eruptions, hypoxia, rectal bleeding and neurological disorders. On June 7, said Misra, security officials from the Union ministry of home affairs informed him that he had suffered arsenic poisoning. If not for their timely intervention and the treatment provided by doctors in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Mumbai, he “would have died of multiple organ failure within three weeks”.
There have been subsequent attempts to kill him apparently: poisonous snakes were caught from his residential compound several times, he said. Misra believes he has been a victim of “espionage attacks”.
An expert in building synthetic aperture radars, Misra was director of the Ahmedabad-based Space Applications Centre. Born in 1961 in Raigada, Odisha, he started his career in ISRO in 1984 and was involved in the development of several breakthrough technologies. He won the Hari Om Ashram Prerit Vikram Sarabhai Research Award in 2004 and the ISRO Merit Award in 2004.
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