BHUBANESWAR: The Crime Branch of Police on Saturday took five persons, arrested on the charges of espionage in DRDO, on seven-day remand. They will be interrogated at Cuttack. Earlier in the day, the court of Sub-Divisional Judicial Magistrate at Balasore granted remand of the five, including a staffer and four contractual employees of Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur-on-sea, for a week.
A special team of Crime Branch led by Additional SP Prasanta Bisoi, who visited several places in Balasore for the last three days in connection with the 'leak of defence secretes', brought the accused persons to Cuttack for grilling.
Although a two-member team of National Investigation Agency (NIA) has been camping at Balasore to investigate the links of the accused persons with the Pakistani agents, they are yet to take over the charge formally. The team has, however, met the police officials who arrested the five men, and visited the places where they were deployed inside the ITR. Sources said that the NIA will take over the case for investigation, if required.
The Crime Branch is said to have collected the evidence of information shared with the foreign agents from the police besides the details of money transactions done between the accused persons and the agents. Since it is a case of honey-trap, the probing agency will investigate it from all angles.
Addl DGP (Crime Branch) Sanjeeb Panda said the focus will be to ascertain what information they have shared with whom and who else are involved.
The Balasore police had arrested contractual employees - Basanta Behera (52), Hemanta Kumar Mistri (52), Tapas Ranjan Nayak (41), Sk Musafir (32), all of Balasore and permanent employee Sachin Kumar Chatta of Uttar Pradesh for allegedly leaking defence information to Pakistani agents.