Jun

12

The case of the missing atomic scientist

June 12, 2009 posted by indiatime |

Yesterday, India officially launched a manhunt for Lokanathan Mahalingam, a senior atomic scientist, whose abrupt disappearance 4 days ago, has everyone deeply worried. Mahalingam is a senior training officer who works with simulator training at the Kaiga atomic power plant. He is considered to be a level-G officer, just a grade below the director, and has a 25-year long experience in the field. And before he worked at Kaiga, he worked at another one of India’s nuclear power plants.

The morning of Wednesday, Mahalingam’s wife filed a missing person’s report that he had failed to return from his usual morning walk on Monday. He hadn’t carried his cell phone and has now become untraceable.

The authorities have so far failed to find any clues relating to his disappearance. There hasn’t been any ransom demand, no eye witness reports of abduction, and Mahalingam didn’t seem to have any personal enemies. In fact, the only lead the police have so far is that he had similarly disappeared ten years ago and had supposedly gone to ’seek spiritual solace’. So the police have sent detectives to nearby temples to find out if Mahalingam has disappeared to seek any additional spiritual solace.

Only a few days ago, Ravi Mule, another employee at the same plant was found murdered around the jungle surrounding the atomic plant. But his murder is yet unsolved and nobody has any idea if Mule’s murder is related to Mahalingam’s disappearance. Nobody knows why the scientist’s wife waited two long days to report him missing, nobody knows if his wife knows more than what she is saying she does, and nobody knows if indeed this is another one of Mahalingam’s spiritual solace acts. Nobody has a clue yet.

Atomic scientists vanishing into the unknown isn’t something that hasn’t happened however. In the 1940s and 50s, this was commonplace, and many of the atomic scientists including some with top secret clearance, vanished into the oblivion. Bruno Pontecorvo, a British atomic scientist, vanished in 1950 but emerged in the Soviet Union 5 years later in 1955, saying he was seeking political solace behind the iron curtain.

Twenty years ago, Ronald Stump, an American nuclear chemist missing from Lawrence Livermore lab, was found living in a motor home. Stump too, had top clearance, but his disappearance had more to do with him being pursued for fraud charges, rather than anyone abducting him or him seeking spiritual solace.

For now however, Mahalingam’s missing remains a mystery deeply shrouded in the jungles of Kaiga. Did the simulator specialist pull off a perfect missing act after simulating and practising his disappearance? Or was he plucked by the naxalites or some radical terrorists or the LTTE separatists?


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