Hyd police asks CBI to help issue red corner notice against accused in phone tapping case

Hyderabad: The Hyderabad Police has approached the CBI for issuing a Red Corner Notice against two accused including the former chief of Special Intelligence Bureau in Telangana T Prabhakar Rao, a key accused in the phone-tapping case.

A suspended DSP of the Special Intelligence Bureau (SIB), two Additional Superintendents of Police and a former Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), were arrested by Hyderabad Police on March 13 for allegedly erasing the intelligence information from various electronic gadgets as well as for alleged phone tapping during the previous BRS regime.

The former SIB chief and another accused in the case are absconding and are suspected to be in the US.

Hyderabad Police Commissioner K Sreenivasa Reddy on Saturday said he had recently met the CBI Director and requested him to expedite the Red Corner Notice (against the two absconding accused).

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is the nodal agency for the Interpol in India and a request for the worldwide alert has to be routed through the agency.

"The case will go ahead once the main people are arrested and they are now absconding. We have written to the US Consul General also that they (the accused) are misusing the other country's visas. We are hopeful in the coming days...,” the Hyderabad Police chief told reporters.

He said it (red corner notice) is under process and "we want to expedite it."

The case is going on and the other accused in the case, who are in jail, despite their best efforts are not getting bail because this is a serious crime which involved invasion into the private lives of the people, the senior police official said.

Reacting to a query if the police were contemplating issuing notices to political leaders as part of investigation into the case, the Commissioner said "as the case progresses...definitely."

Prabhakar Rao has been accused of forming a "Special Operations Team" under the suspended DSP within the SIB for carrying out certain specific tasks related to political surveillance to benefit the then ruling political party and its leaders.

The retired police officer, who is in the US for “medical treatment”, had recently denied the allegations made against him and termed them as “wild and false”.

The suspended DSP and his team developed profiles of hundreds of people, intercepted hundreds of phone calls of several persons, police had said.

The arrested accused along with others have been accused of developing profiles of several persons in an unauthorised manner and monitoring them clandestinely and illegally in SIB and using them in a partisan manner to favour a political party at the behest of some persons and also conspiracy in destroying the records to cause disappearance of evidence of their crimes, police earlier said.

Meanwhile, a release from Hyderabad Police said seven teams of Cyber Crimes Police Station of Hyderabad participated in a special drive in Gujarat and caught 36 accused including a chartered accountant and seven key accused persons of India and detected 20 cases of cyber crimes here.

The accused were wanted in 983 cases across India including the cases of Telangana, it said.

The arrested accused who were involved in 15 cases of online trading–cum-investment fraud and investment fraud and four 'online parcel’ scams and one KYC fraud were arrested following complaints from people (victims) in Hyderabad that they were cheated by the accused who collected amounts from them either by luring or threatening them, police said.

Inputs from PTI