New Delhi: With India requesting France to initiate an urgent probe into the Scorpene data leak and to share the findings, a French government official told a news agency that the data was stolen, and not leaked.
“It is not a leak, it is theft,” the agency quoted the source as saying. “We have not found any DCNS negligence, but we have identified some dishonesty by an individual,” it said.
Navy allays fears on Scorpene leak
The source said that the documents seemed to have been stolen in 2011 by a former French employee who was fired while providing training in India on the use of the submarines.
DCNS is the French company that is building the six Scorpene submarines at Mumbai’s Mazagaon Docks. DCNS, a naval defence and energy major, is 64 per cent state-owned.
India has also initiated a probe by a high-level committee constituted by the defence ministry and the Navy to assess the impact of the leak and suggest “necessary steps to mitigate any probable security compromise”.
On Wednesday, India was rocked by one of its biggest defence scandals when The Australian newspaper put out 22,484 pages of sensitive data on Scorpene submarines being built for India.
The data comprised highly sensitive combat and stealth capabilities, including the actual frequencies at which they gather intelligence, their range, endurance, diving depths, the noise they radiate at different speeds as well as their magnetic and infrared signatures, safety parameter zones, array performance etc, substantially reducing the fighting capability of the under-construction submarine fleet.
On Thursday, the Indian Navy came out with a statement saying: “The documents that have been posted on the website by an Australian news agency have been examined and do not pose any security compromise as the vital parameters have been blacked out.” The discomfiting statement had several inaccuracies.
Meanwhile, Adm. Arun Prakash (Retd), during whose tenure as Navy Chief and chairman of the chiefs of staff committee the Scorpene submarine deal had been signed on October 6, 2005, is convinced that the Rs 23,500-crore six-submarine project, also called P75, should not suffer any derailment.
