Journalism of Courage
Widening its probe into attempts to illegally access call detail records (CDRs) of certain individuals,the Delhi Police has arrested six more persons,including three from its own ranks. Police claimed that these men illegally accessed 52 CDRs of several politicians,bureaucrats,corporate heads and journalists.
In February-March this year,four persons,including a police constable,were arrested for allegedly trying to access the CDR of BJP leader Arun Jaitley. The six persons arrested on Wednesday night are Assistant Sub-Inspector Gopal Das,Head Constable Harish Singh Negi,Constable Harish Kumar,Home Guard Mehraj Saife,and two private detectives,Puneet Verma and Alok Gupta. Police claimed the men had been working for a detective agency run by Anurag Singh and Nitish who,along with constable Arvind Dabas and private detective Neeraj,were arrested earlier this year.
While police sources said the accused had been accessing the CDRs for a year or more,the incident came to light only in February this year,after three attempts were made to access Jaitleys CDR.
During investigations into the Jaitley case,the police came across 52 CDRs which had been compromised. Of these,22 CDRs were found to have been accessed from the offices of the Assistant Commissioners of Police (ACP) in Khajoori Khas,Samaypur Badli and Shahdara.
It was found that the accused policemen had sent requests for accessing the CDRs through email accounts of their ACPs. They forged the signatures of their ACPs on the applications. We sent the applications to the CFSL. Once it was proved that the signatures were forged,we went ahead with the arrests, a police source said.
The last CDR that the accused accessed was in December 2012-January 2013. According to police,Anurag,the technical expert,was given specific numbers whose CDRs were sought. The numbers were passed on to Neeraj who would get in touch with detectives at the local level. These detectives,in turn,would approach their police contacts who would then use their ACPs email accounts to seek the CDRs.
It is alleged that the clients were charged Rs 2 lakh-5 lakh for the CDRs,depending on the duration for which the records were sought and the stature of the person whose records were sought.
Anurag and his associates are alleged to have spread their network across several police stations. It is alleged that they paid constables to access CDRs using their ACPs email accounts. The constables,however,were not told of the identity of the person whose CDR was being accessed.
The police are set to file a supplementary chargesheet in the case.
The six accused,meanwhile,were produced before a city court which sent them to police custody for three days.
