Sai Shankar, the hacker involved in the criminal conspiracy case against actor Dileep, has become an approver in the case. He confirmed to TNM about turning an approver, weeks after revealing that he had helped the accused cover up data on their mobile phones. Sai was the eighth accused in the conspiracy case, which was filed in January this year.
The case came up shortly after new revelations cropped up in the 2017 actor assault case of Kerala. Director Balachandrakumar, once close to Dileep, produced a series of audio clips incriminating the actor and others. Dileep, an accused in the actor assault case, is alleged to have masterminded the crime. He was arrested for a few months in 2017, and the recordings are allegedly from the period immediately after he was released on bail.
Among the recordings were alleged threats against police officials who investigated the actor assault case, issued by Dileep and his male relatives. Baiju Paulose, one of the police officials, filed the case in January, after which Dileep and the other accused were summoned for three days of questioning. As part of the investigation, the state’s crime branch, probing the case, also asked for mobile phones of the accused. However, the accused were reluctant to surrender their phones and went to court against it. After days of hearing, the court ordered the phones to be submitted to the Aluva magistrate.
There were questions on why Dileep and his lawyers were reluctant to submit the phones, especially with Balachandrakumar’s claims surfacing last year. It was at this juncture that Sai came out with the revelation that the counsel for the accused had approached him, asking his help to cover up data on two of Dileep’s phones. Sai, in an interview with TNM, said that there was a large amount of data, including court-related documents that they wanted to remove from the phones. Sai did not delete the data since it could later be retrieved using data recovery tools, instead he covered it up with junk data. However, Sai is confident that he could recover all the data that he helped replace. This may lead to others being incriminated, including lawyers.