Suspended Telangana DSP accused of tapping BRS opponents’ phones arrested

He is also accused of having copied intelligence data to his personal devices. He was booked last week on charges of tampering with evidence, breach of trust, and criminal conspiracy.

Kumar was taken into custody on Tuesday night and arrested on Wednesday following questioning overnight, officials said.

According to sources, Kumar is suspected of having been involved in the tapping of phones of Opposition leaders and others when the BRS was in power. SIB Additional Superintendent of Police D Ramesh had lodged the first complaint against Kumar after finding that he was involved in the alleged phone tapping and copying of data between 2018 and 2023.

Kumar regularly copied intelligence data onto his personal pen drives, and is suspected of using the official intelligence-gathering machinery to profile several people, including the BRS’s opponents, officials said.

After the Congress came to power in December last year following the BRS’s defeat in Assembly elections, he allegedly tried to destroy evidence of these activities.

According to the complaint against him, Kumar entered his office on the night of December 4, a day after the counting of votes in the Assembly election ended, and switched off all the CCTV cameras before destroying the hard drives and other disks that contained intelligence data collected over many years. He then allegedly installed new, blank hard drives.

After this came to light, the Congress government transferred him to Sircilla district and asked senior SIB officers to conduct a probe.

An FIR has been registered against him at the Panjagutta police station in Hyderabad. He was booked under Indian Penal Code sections 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servant, banker, merchant or agent), 427 (mischief causing damage to the amount of fifty rupee or upwards), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence), and 120(B) (criminal conspiracy). He was also booked under various sections of the Prevention of Destruction of Public Records Act, 1984, and the Information Technology Act, 2000.