Actor Dileep, alleged mastermind of the 2017 actor assault case of Kerala, wants the court to not proceed with the hearing of a plea by the survivor to investigate an alleged leak of the visuals of the attack on her. The visuals of the abduction and sexual assault of the woman actor were in the custody of a lower court when the alleged leak occurred. Dileep submitted a counter petition to the High Court asking that further probe about the leaked visuals should continue only after two important witnesses in the actor-assault case have been examined, according to Reporter TV.
It was in early 2022 that reports about the leak of the visuals, stored in a memory card, came out. By June 2022, it was revealed in a report of the State Forensic Science Lab in Thiruvananthapuram that the memory card was accessed more than once in 2018, when it was in the custody of a court. It was also said that the hash value of the memory card had changed, which indicated that something within it had been altered.
After the report surfaced, the survivor actor approached the High Court with a plea to investigate the alleged leak. The court has been hearing the arguments in the case when Dileep moved the counter plea. Dileep claimed that the survivor was asking for a probe into the leak only to delay the proceedings of the trial of the actor-assault case.
The Crime Branch, which is probing the case, approached the High Court in June 2022 when a lower court halted the investigation into the leak of the visuals.
The assault on the woman actor took place in February 2017 in a car in Kochi. After the prime accused, Pulsar Suni was nabbed, Dileep was named as the eighth accused in the case, as the one who had allegedly masterminded the crime.