Mumbai:The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has told the Bombay High Court that the accused in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case were "mixing up and controverting crucial facts without much basis and confusing the court to frustrate the trial proceedings".
In an affidavit filed before the high court earlier this week, the NIA urged a bench of Justices Nitin Jamdar and S V Kotwal that it would provide cloned copies of electronic evidence relied upon by the central agency in the case to activists Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha and other accused once it received them from the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL).
The agency urged the court to not stay the trial proceedings in the interim before the special court. It also denied the allegations made by the accused persons in the case that the cloned copies of electronic evidence seized from them had been tampered with, and added that the cloned copies of five such evidence pieces were being examined by the FSL and once it received them, it would provide the copies to the accused.
The accused persons were "mixing up and controverting crucial facts without much basis and confusing the court to frustrate the trial proceedings", it alleged and said that to delay the trial was the "ulterior motive" of the accused persons. The NIA's affidavit was in response to the petitions filed in August this year by Bharadwaj and Navlakha, seeking clone copies of all devices seized from them in the case by the central agency.
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They had said through senior counsel Yug Chaudhary that while the special court had scheduled framing of charges in the case on August 23, after which the trial will commence, the accused had not yet received certain material, including cloned copies of the digital hard disc recovered by the probe agency. They had said that denial of the cloned copies was in breach of their fundamental rights.