NIA takes over case after four people are arrested for leaking sensitive information from DRDO바카라s missile test range to foreign players.
It바카라s a development that has got the country바카라s security establishment seeing red. In a chilling reminder of a similar incident in 2015, four contractual workers of Defence Research and Development Organisation바카라s high security Interim Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur in Odisha바카라s Balasore district were arrested on September 14 on charges of spying for a foreign intelligence agency, suspected to be Pakistan바카라s notorious ISI.
Earlier, on February 11, the additional district judge바카라s court in Balasore had sentenced Ishwar Behera, a former contractual cameraperson with ITR, to life imprisonment, on charges of spying for ISI. Behera was arrested on January 23, 2015, after sufficient evidence was gathered about his shady dealings with the Pakistani agency.
The four arrested on September 14바카라AC operators Basanta Behera (52) and Sheikh Musafir (32), generator operator Hemanta Kumar Mistry (52) and security guard Tapas Ranjan Nayak (41) posted at the ITR main gate바카라were booked under sections 120(B) (criminal conspiracy), 121(A) (waging war against India) and 34 (common intention), besides various sections of the Official Secrets Act. All four had been under surveillance since central agencies sent intelligence inputs about their dubious dealings. They were arrested only after substantial evidence was gathered about them, police said.
바카라The accused persons were in touch with foreign agents through various ISD phones, and received huge sums for passing on sensitive information,바카라 IG (Eastern Range) Himanshu Lal said, without going into details.
Earlier, Balasore SP Sudhanshu Sekhar Mishra had hinted at the possibility of the accused having been caught in a honey trap. 바카라Their social media accounts and call details are being investigated,바카라 he had said on the day of the arrests. The accused were reportedly in touch with a woman from Uttar Pradesh.
Two days after the first lot of arrests, a fifth employee, Sachin Kumar Chhatta, driver of a senior ITR official, was arrested by the crime branch, which had taken over the investigation from Balasore police. All five were produced before the sub-divisional judicial magistrate바카라s court on September 18 and taken on remand for seven days. They are currently being grilled by a team of officers at the crime branch headquarters in Cuttack, to elicit more information about the secrets they have passed on, and if there were others involved in the espionage racket.
Given the sensitive nature of the case, it was inevitable that the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) got involved in it. A two-member team from the premier national agency바카라s Calcutta office reached Balasore on September 17 and interrogated Anurag Sen, chief security officer at the ITR, for nearly two hours.
Additional director general (crime branch) Sanjeev Panda, however, clarified that the investigation remains with Odisha Police as of now. 바카라We바카라ll extend all possible cooperation to the NIA as and when it takes over the case,바카라 he said.
Given the nature of the job of the four contractual employees, it was initially believed they could not have accessed any sensitive information about the ITR and its missile-testing programme. But the arrest of Chhatta, a regular employee and driver of a top ITR official who lives on campus, has added a different dimension to the affair. Investigators no longer rule out the possibility of involvement of senior ITR officials in the racket. They are hoping to get more leads during the ongoing custodial interrogation of the accused to crack the case at the earliest.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Spy By The Sea")