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Telangana SIB under KCR govt snooped on HC judges, lawyers, says ex-SP
The Special Intelligence Branch (SIB) of Telangana police had snooped even on high court judges, advocates, journalists, leaders of various student unions and caste organisations by tapping their phones during the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) regime, a senior police officer formerly associated with the SIB has claimed in a confession statement.
The Special Intelligence Branch (SIB) of Telangana police had snooped even on high court judges, advocates, journalists, leaders of various student unions and caste organisations by tapping their phones during the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) regime, a senior police officer formerly associated with the SIB has claimed in a confession statement.
The confession statement of N Bhujanga Rao, who was posted as additional superintendent of police in SIB during the BRS regime, was made before the investigating officer of Panjagutta police in April. It came to light on Tuesday, a day after a similar statement by retired Indian Police Service (IPS) officer P Radha Kishan Rao, a former Hyderabad task force DCP who was associated with the SIB, surfaced.
In his statement, Radha Kishan Rao alleged that SIB had tapped phones of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders and trapped them in the BRS legislators’ poaching case so that former chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao, or KCR, could bargain with the BJP national leadership to bail out his daughter K Kavitha in the Delhi excise case.
Radha Kishan Rao has been lodged in judicial custody since his arrested in the telephone tapping case on March 23.
In the latest confession statement, reviewed by HT, Bhujanga Rao has claimed that a special operations team (SOT) was created within the SIB in 2017, exclusively to keep surveillance over activities of leaders from opposition parties, their families, besides traders and critics of the BRS.
The SOT — which was directly supervised by former inspector general of police (IGP) T Prabhakar Rao who was heading the SIB — also used to monitor the movements of student leaders, journalists and leaders of various caste organisations who were critical of the KCR government, the confession statement said.
“Even high court judges like Justice Sarath Kaja and advocates who were handling important cases of government and party leaders were under the surveillance of the SOT to find out more details about their personal lives and their activities so that they can be influenced or countered at appropriate times,” Bhujanga Rao has claimed.
He also confessed to having helped BRS leaders in settling their civil disputes as well as disputes of various firms and business people. The SOT had also tapped the phones of BJP leader K Venkat Ramana Reddy, who contested the assembly polls from Kamareddy in November last year, and incumbent chief minister A Revanth Reddy’s brother Kondal Reddy during the electioneering, the confession statement added.
So far, five police officers have been arrested in connection with the telephone tapping case, registered at the Punjagutta police station on March 10. The sensational case came to light after the BRS, which headed the government in Telangana since its formation in 2014, lost the assembly polls in November last year to the Congress.
Mekala Tirupathanna, another additional SP who was part of the SIB during the BRS regime, has also confessed to having snooped on BJP and Congress leaders in Kamareddy during the previous assembly polls so as to “reduce the flow of funds to the opposition, particularly the Congress”.
Tirupathanna has also admitted to having destroyed the old hard disks in the SIB systems after replaced them with new hard disks, so as to erase the records of illegal phone tapping.
HT reached out to several BRS leaders for a comment on the latest confession statements of former SIB officers, but none spoke on the matter.
