The very tool that was meant to threaten a sexual assault survivor into silence became one of the most crucial evidence in the attack on her. The assault took place in a car in Kerala’s Kochi on February 17, 2017 against a well-known actor and was recorded on video and stored on a memory card. When the survivor went to the police and the perpetrators were nabbed within days, the memory card became one of the first pieces of evidence of the crime. The police concluded that the gang of men, led by a driver called Pulsar Suni, were acting at the behest of a mastermind, and within months, zeroed in on actor Dileep as an accused. In the years that the case went on for, technical evidence became vital in uncovering important details about the crime.
The visuals of the attack that Pulsar Suni – who was named the main accused – had saved in a memory card were given to an advocate, who handed it over to the Angamaly magistrate court. After a forensic examination, the memory card was kept sealed in the magistrate court until March 2018. In the next year, it was placed in the custody of the Ernakulam Principal and Sessions Court. Afterward, it was taken to the trial court – the Ernakulam District and Sessions court – where it remained.
Balachandrakumar’s audio clips
Towards the end of 2021, nearly two years after the trial in the case began, late filmmaker Balachandrakumar came out publicly to claim that Dileep was in possession of visuals of the attack. He said that he was a friend of Dileep’s and was present in his house when Dileep spoke about the visuals. He alleged that a ‘VIP’ had come to Dileep’s place with the visuals, after boosting its audio at a studio since it had not been clear earlier. Balachandrakumar claimed that he had incriminating audio clips to prove it.
The audio clips also allegedly contained threats made by Dileep against the investigating officials of the case. On the basis of this evidence, the police filed a new conspiracy case against Dileep in January 2022.
Sai Shankar’s ‘data deletion’
Soon afterward, in April 2022, another new witness in the case surfaced with even more technical evidence. Cyber expert Sai Shankar came out to the media about removing a lot of data from a couple of phones that Dileep’s counsel had given him, just after Balachandrakumar made his revelations. He told TNM that while the team of advocate Raman Pillai, Dileep’s counsel, had approached him earlier for technical advice, they came to him again in 2022 with a request to delete data from two phones.
Sai said that he was asked to remove photos and documents from an iPhone 12 Pro and an iPhone 13. Dileep, he said, had been very clear about what he wanted removed, what was to be retained, and what had to be duplicated. Sai was asked to make three copies of the deleted data and save it in a hard disk and save one copy of the retained data in a pen drive. He said that he followed the instructions and returned everything but claimed that he could recover all of it, and turned an approver in the conspiracy case against Dileep, for which he was listed as an accused earlier.
Leaked conversations of Dileep’s lawyers
Around the same time that Sai made his revelations, more technical data incriminating Dileep emerged. Recordings of calls made allegedly between Dileep’s lawyer and witnesses in the case were leaked in April 2022. In the conversations, the lawyer could allegedly be heard coaching Dileep’s brother Anoop on how to answer questions at the trial. It became controversial because of how the witness was apparently being prepared and asked to lie about Manju Warrier, Dileep’s former wife and another crucial witness for the prosecution. Among other things, Anoop was asked to lie that Manju used to come home drunk when she was married to Dileep.
In another audio recording, a conversation allegedly between Dileep’s lawyer and his brother-in-law Sooraj suggested that they had watched the visuals of the sexual assault multiple times. In the recording, Dileep’s lawyer allegedly talks about one part of the visual and claims that he had watched it along with an expert. Dileep was legally allowed to watch the visuals only twice – once by the Angamaly Magistrate on December 15, 2017 and the second time on December 19, 2019 in front of the trial court judge, Honey M Varghese.
Memory card leak
Another big turn in the case came later in 2022 with the revelation that the memory card had been tampered with. The State Forensic Science Lab found that the memory card was illegally accessed twice in 2018 – on January 9 and December 13 – while it was in the custody of the Angamaly court and the Ernakulam Principal and Sessions court respectively. Later, it emerged that the visuals were accessed a third time on July 19, 2021 while the memory card was kept at the trial court. The forensic reports also stated that the hash value of the device had changed, which meant that the contents in the memory card may have been altered.
The hash value of a device is a string of alphanumeric characters that are unique and can be used to identify the device. In the forensic report, it was revealed that the volume hash – the hash value of the memory card – had changed while that of the eight files inside it had not. This meant that even though the individual files may not have changed, some other change was effected on the device. The concern was that the contents of the card may have been copied or sent to other devices, since the last illegal access was through a mobile phone which had apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Instagram installed on it.
When the first of these revelations surfaced, a letter from the trial court judge, Honey Varghese, to the forensic lab had cropped up, in which she asked about the number of times the memory card was accessed. The lab sent her a report saying that it was accessed once, illegally between March 2018 and March 2019. But the judge did not allegedly record this or communicate it to any of the parties involved. She did not release the forensic report for two years. The survivor filed a plea in the High Court, concerned about the judge’s agenda.
Later, when the police submitted a plea to the trial court asking to examine if the memory card was accessed while it was in the custody of the court, judge Honey dismissed the petition, calling it unintelligible, ill-conceived, and ill-motivated.
However, the High Court ordered judge Honey to conduct a fact-finding enquiry into the survivor’s allegation that the memory card might have been tampered with. The judgement that came on December 7, 2023 also acknowledged that the memory card was illegally accessed thrice and said that “we failed to protect the victim’s interest, which resulted in the violation of her fundamental constitutional right”.
The revelation also led the High Court to issue guidelines for dealing with sexually explicit evidence.
Four months later, the probe by the trial court revealed who had accessed the memory card while it was in the custody of the three courts – Magistrate Leena Rasheed at the Angamaly court, Personal Assistant Mahesh Mohan of Judge Kauser Edappagath at the Ernakulam Principal and Sessions Court, and trial court official Tajudeen at the Ernakulam District and Sessions Court.
In the latest, the survivor has filed a contempt of court petition against retired police officer R Sreelekha for a YouTube video claiming that Dileep was innocent and citing technological reasons to imply that the evidence against him was fabricated. Sreelekha’s main contention was about the mobile phone that Pulsar Suni had used in prison. The police had stated that Suni got a phone with the help of two cell mates, Vishnu and Vipin Lal, and an outsider called Mahesh, and had got depositions from all three of them. However, Sreelekha alleged that the phone could have been brought in with the help of a police official. She also claimed that a photograph that showed Dileep and Pulsar Suni together was photoshopped. However, the person who took the photo, Bidil, said that it was a selfie he had taken with Dileep at a film set where Suni was in the background. No editing was done on the image, he said.
In their final submission, the police have also included as evidence the Call Data Record (CDR) of Dileep’s driver Appunni, to prove that he was near the location of the survivor on the day of the abduction in February 2017. Dileep’s phone was switched off at the time.