A special court on Tuesday allowed the National Investigation Agency’s (NIA) plea to hand over about 25 devices belonging to some of the accused in the Elgar Parishad-Bhima Koregaon case to the Supreme Court-appointed technical committee, which had sought access to these to probe for possible infection by Pegasus malware.
On Saturday, the NIA had approached the court with the plea, as the apex court-appointed committee headed by a former SC judge had written to the agency’s director-general on January 31 for the same. The committee had sought the mobile phones of Sudha Bharadwaj, Rona Wilson, Hany Babu, Shoma Sen, Anand Teltumbde, Vernon Gonsalves and Varavara Rao. The committee had sought access to these as it had been informed by their lawyers or family members that these devices were infected by Pegasus. The NIA had also received an email regarding the same from an official of the apex court.
The devices had been seized by the Pune police that had first probed the case before it was taken over by the NIA. They were now in the NIA court’s custody, having been submitted along with the charge sheet, except for the mobile phones of Sudha Bharadwaj and Vernon Gonsalves, as they are still with the forensic lab in Kalina, Mumbai.
Some of the accused on Tuesday had sought that the articles be opened in the presence of their advocates. Special Judge Dinesh E Kothalikar, in his order, directed that the court registrar open the seal of the articles in presence of the agency’s investigating officer as well as the advocates, at 11am on Wednesday. The devices were further directed to be sealed and handed over to the NIA officer in the advocate’s presence. The court further stated that the investigating officer must hand them over to the technical committee and if they were returned, he should submit the devices to the court immediately.
The technical committee will make digital copies of the devices in presence of the officer presenting them and return it to the officer immediately, the NIA had informed the court in its plea on Saturday.
By an order on October 27 last year, the SC had appointed a committee to look into unauthorised spying allegations using Israeli spyware Pegasus that was used for surveillance on journalists, activists and politicians. The committee had been formed on a petition by an advocate, Manoharlal Sharma, in the SC, seeking a probe on a report in the New York Times that India had bought Pegasus spyware from Israel.
