New Delhi, June 29
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed a chargesheet against two former DGPs, Siby Mathews of Kerala and R B Sreekumar of Gujarat, and three other retired police officials in connection with the alleged framing of space scientist Nambi Narayanan in the 1994 ISRO espionage case.
The CBI has filed its chargesheet against then DIG Siby Mathews, who headed the Special Investigation Team (SIT) that probed the 1994 Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) espionage case, Sreekumar, who was the deputy director in the Intelligence Bureau, P S Jayaprakash, who was then posted in the SIB-Kerala, then deputy superintendent of police K K Joshua and inspector S Vijayan.
The accused have been charged them under 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. The federal agency had lodged the case on the Supreme Court's orders on April 15, 2021.
