After the NIA denied Elgaar Parishad case accused Arun Ferreira’s allegation that some emails it had relied on as evidence had been illegally intercepted, a special court on Monday rejected his application for the investigative agency to provide “the competent authority's order issued for intercepting emails”. “As such, at no point of time, there was any interception carried out and the question of obtaining orders from the competent authority to carry out the same does not arise at all,” the National Investigation Agency said in its reply to Ferreira’s plea. The emails referred to by the lawyer- activist were downloaded following the proper procedure during the investigation, the NIA submitted. The emails are alleged to have been seized from electronic devices of Rona Wilson, another accused in the case, in 2018 by the Pune police. Ferreira submitted that the emails were alleged to have been sent and received between two IDs claimed to be those of accused Varavara Rao and a wanted accused. The emails contain communication regarding arms and ammunition, and form a part of the evidence against the accused, who are alleged to be members of the banned organisation CPI (Maoist). According to Ferreira, the Pune police had downloaded the emails on four occasions within an hour of their being sent and that they were being referred to as evidence without showing an order from a competent authority. The NIA told the court that an email ID and a password were found in a document seized from Wilson’s electronic device after a forensic analysis. The investigating officer then downloaded the communication in the presence of two independent witnesses and a cyber expert. The officer also recorded the procedure on video and audio as a precautionary measure, it added.
