Bhubaneswar: One of the accused, who was arrested on charge of sharing vital classified information of DRDO’s Integrated Testing Range (ITR) Chandipur to some foreign agent, has received money from Dubai.
One of the five accused has received a cash transfer of around Rs 38,000 from a bank account in Dubai. The money was transferred to the account of the arrested accused in two instalments, said Additional Director General of Police, Crime Branch, Sanjeeb Panda.
“We have seized the mobile phones of all the five accused. We are verifying their bank account details and social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram. The police have also found that an unknown woman operative introduced herself with several names and trapped people on popular social networking site Facebook,” he said.
“We have also found that the unknown woman operative introduced herself with several names and trapped people on popular social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram. She trapped the accused in the Balasore case and interacted with them over Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. During investigation, we found she was using a UK SIM,” Panda said.
The ADG of Police further informed that a team of the Indian Air Force (IAF) had also interrogated the accused in the past two days while the National Investigation Agency (NIA) is yet to interrogate the arrested persons presently at on remand of Odisha crime branch.
Earlier, a 2-member team of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) from Kolkata visited Odisha on September 16 to understand the modus operandi of the accused.
Revealing further steps of the investigation, Panda said all the social media accounts (Facebook and Instagram) of the accused will be thoroughly checked and examined. The mobile phones will be sent for cyber forensic examination. “We will also try to ascertain if the accused received any other benefit through any other means,” he added.
It was suspect that the woman is honey-trapped the five former contractual staff of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in Balasore,
On September 14, the Balasore police had arrested the five former DRDO contractual employees on charges of sharing classified defence information with unknown foreign agents, who were suspected to be from Pakistan.
The accused persons are — Basanta Behera (52), AC operator; Hemanta Kumar Mistri (52), diesel genset operator; Tapas Ranjan Nayak (41), employee at ITR main gate; Sk. Musafir (32), AC operator; and Sachin Kumar, a driver — all from Balasore district.
