The Supreme Court on Thursday, December 11, directed former Telangana State Intelligence Bureau chief T Prabhakar Rao to surrender before the Jubilee Hills Police Station, Hyderabad by 11 am the next day for custodial interrogation in connection with the alleged illegal phone-tapping case.
The order was passed by the bench of Justice BV Nagarathna and Justice R Mahadevan after the state alleged that he deleted electronic evidence from his devices during the interim protection he was granted from arrest.
The Court passed the order while hearing Prabhakar Rao's anticipatory bail plea. The Court however, clarified that it has not dismissed the anticipatory bail, but kept it pending.
“Their contention is that there is no material which they can gather from your party because the data is not available. It may be somewhere else... We will keep the matter pending. Let there be a custodial interrogation. And you tell us from when to when you will have the custodial interrogation, of course on the condition that no physical harm is done to him, he is a senior citizen,” Justice Nagarathna was quoted as saying by LiveLaw.
The judges also allowed medication and home food to Prabhakar Rao regularly during his police custody.
Prabhakar Rao is accused of intercepting phones of politicians, high court judges and others to aid the previous BRS government. According to the state, the police officer did not comply with the Court's earlier order to reset all his iCloud passwords.
The Court in October had ordered him to reset and share the passwords with the police in the presence of forensic experts after the state claimed that he had formatted his devices and destroyed evidence while under interim protection from arrest.
According to reports, while hearing the arguments on Prabhakar Rao’s bail, the court questioned why he destroyed hard disks containing data from the Telangana SIB office and replaced it with new hard disks.
However, the former Intelligence officer’s counsel argued that the destruction of the material was done as per the decision of a review committee and also contended that he was cooperating with the investigation and even appeared before the SIT six times in compliance with the Supreme Court orders.
"He has also produced all email IDs used by him in the past, reset the password of cloud accounts, and data was also extracted by FSL experts," the counsel said, according to The Times of India.
The state, however, argued that the cloud accounts have been accessed but nothing was found in them.