BENGALURU: A new spectre is haunting the National Investigation Agency (NIA) following last week’s verdict of Karnataka High Court that approved sharing of sensitive information about armed forces and defence installations with the counsel of the terror accused.
The NIA had recovered sensitive information from one of the 25 terror accused, who had planned to eliminate prominent politicians in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, including state BJP chief Prahlad Joshi, some journalists and police officers. The accused who allegedly have links with international terror groups were arrested in Bengaluru in 2012 and a chargesheet filed.
On Monday, a division bench of Justice H Billappa and Justice K N Phaneendra dismissed the criminal appeal filed by the NIA against the May 5 order of the NIA Special Court, Bengaluru. The Special Court had directed the prosecution to furnish the copy of a mirror image of three internal hard disks, six laptops, seven pen drives and two hard disks to the suspected terrorists.
The NIA, now, plans to challenge the high court order in the Supreme Court, sources said.
The third hard disk containing the mirror image is still in the custody of the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), Hyderabad, for analysis. The part analysis report of this disk was received from CFSL in the form of one DVD on September 26, 2014. The retrieved information in the form of printouts were handed over to the Special Court. NIA’s counsel had argued that since the report contained confidential data, it could not be shared in the public domain.
When the Special Court upheld the arguments of the counsel for the accused, the NIA filed a criminal appeal against the court’s judgment in the high court.