Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala): The Thiruvananthapuram Chief Judicial Magistrate Court has granted bail to former cops, accused in the ISRO Espionage Conspiracy case.
Former DGPs Siby Mathews and RB Sreekumar and former IB officer Jayaprakash have been granted bail while the other accused– former SPs S Vijayan and S K Joshua did not appear in court. The court has directed them to be presented.
The apex court had ordered the probe based on the report of a high-level committee, which had said the investigation into the role of erring police officials in the 1994 espionage case involving Narayanan be given to the CBI.
The CBI registered the case in May and after completing the investigation, a chargesheet was submitted to the court in June where a possibility of conspiracy was hinted at. The CBI probe had found the allegations against Narayan to be false. Terming the police action against the former ISRO scientist “psychopathological treatment”, the apex court had, in September 2018, said his “liberty and dignity”, basic to his human rights, were jeopardised as he was taken into custody and, despite all the glory of the past, was eventually compelled to face “cynical abhorrence”. The court acquitted Nambi Narayanan due to a lack of evidence.
The accused were charged with Sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 342 (wrongful confinement), 330 (voluntarily causing hurt to extract a confession), 167 (creating false documents), 193 (fabricating evidence), 354 (criminal assault on women) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The Kerala Police had registered two cases in October 1994 after Maldivian national Rasheeda was arrested in Thiruvananthapuram for allegedly obtaining secret drawings of ISRO rocket engines for selling to Pakistan. Narayanan, the then director of the cryogenic project at the ISRO, was arrested, along with the then ISRO deputy director D Sasikumaran and Fousiya Hasan, a Maldivian friend of Rasheeda.
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