By Lila Raj Jhapali, Birtamod, April 5: A quarter of a million rupees in cash has been found at the house of a person who received relief for COVID-19 at Surunga of Kanakai Municipality-4 in Jhapa district.

This was revealed when a fire gutted the house of Thakur Singh Rai, 51, located at settlement of landless squatters at Kanakai Municipality-4 on Saturday night.

A rescue team recovered Rs. 900,000 intact while half-burned notes of Rs. 500 denomination amounting to 600,000 were also collected from his house. The partly burned notes have the numbers and they can be exchanged from the bank.

Rai said that he had 2.45 million in cash, about 18 grams of gold and 200 grams of silver in his house when the house caught fire.

The rescue team of Nepal Police, Red Cross, officials of community forest collected the cash and the 18 tola silver from the house after the fire was doused.

Presently, the cash has been kept at the Police office at Surunga and the Police is probing into the source of the cash.

When the fire broke out at the settlement inside the Kankai community forest area on Saturday evening, 3 houses were gutted including that of Amrita Shrestha and Jhakda Bahadur Darjee.

And the fire had started from Rai's house.

Rai had collected corona disaster relief on Friday from the ward office of Kankai Municipality-4.

The relief package he received was also gutted by the fire.

Rai used to run his life by collecting plastic bottles from the street and has been living at the land of the community forest as a landless squatters.

Khyam Prasad Oli, chair of Kankai community forest group, expressed ire that the incident proved that even rich people had been usurping public land by setting up huts in the name of the landless.

Roshan Subedi, people's representative at the ward, said that Rai was given relief as he said that his livelihood was broken due to lockdown as he could not collect plastic bottles.

Rai has told the police that he had earned the cash from the sale of his land and the interest he got by lending it to others at his village, according to the police. Rai along with other 12 households have been living in the land area of the community forest for the last seven years saying they are flood victims.