Phone Tapping Case: SC Orders Ex-Intel Chief to Surrender on Dec 12

Hyderabad: The Supreme Court of India on Thursday directed phone-tapping case prime accused T. Prabhakar Rao, the State Intelligence Bureau former chief, to surrender before the special investigation team (SIT) at the Jubilee Hills police station at 11 am on Friday.

The court said that the custody was for seven days and directed the investigators to not cause any physical harm to Prabhakar Rao, and that interrogation should be in accordance with the law. The court allowed home food and medication to Prabhakar Rao during the period of custody.

A bench of the apex court comprising Justice B.V. Nagarathna and Justice R. Mahadevan was dealing with the anticipatory bail petition filed by Prabhakar Rao. The bench, keeping his petition pending, directed him to surrender before the SIT, as his phone storage and iCloud did not reveal any data which the court was told had been deleted earlier.

The apex court during a previous hearing in October had directed Prabhakar Rao to submit the iCloud account details and passwords to his phone’s storage in presence FSL experts. On Thursday, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta informed the court that though the passwords were reset, no data was retrieved from his phones and iCloud account, either due to deletion of data or other reasons. The court was informed that the data could not be retrieved from one of the phones which Prabhakar Rao had used in the USA and was deactivated.

During the hearing, counsel for the state submitted that the accounts either showed no data or could not be opened, and argued that crucial digital evidence may have been destroyed or withheld, necessitating custodial questioning.

Noting it, the bench questioned counsel for Prabhakar Rao: “Their contention is that there is no material which they can gather from your party because the data is not available. It may be somewhere else… we will keep the matter pending.”

The court clarified that it had not dismissed the anticipatory bail petition. “We are just saying that let there be an effective investigation, interrogation whatever minus any physical torture or hardship. We are just trying to balance the interest of the petitioner and at the same time the investigation,” Justice Nagarathna said.

Justice Mahadevan questioned the disappearance of large amounts of data. The judge observed, “You removed almost 26 hard drives. When you were directed to give the password you said you forgot everything. Later you were able to remember everything. When they accessed it, nothing was available. Ten years of data collected, nothing was available. Is it not a crime?”

Rao’s counsel Ranjith Kumar replied that the data was deleted on the order of the review committee and he also mentioned that Anil Kumar, then Intelligence chief, had information about it. Justice Mahadevan asked him to show an order permitting the destruction of the hard disks, stating that the rules only permitted removal of data, not destruction.

Kumar requested that the minutes of the review committee meeting dated December 2, 2023, be produced. The minutes are with the government and would support his position that data was deleted on the order of the review committee

Solicitor General Mehta, for the state, contended that the data was destroyed prematurely, and hard disks were destroyed and thrown in a river. He submitted that Prabhakar Rao had bought around 50 hard disks in November 2023.

The court, without going into the issues, viewed that the custodial interrogation of Rao was required and ordered him to surrender. Solicitor General Mehta required 14 days custody, but the court allowed seven days and adjourned the case to December 19.