The sensational phone tapping case in Telangana took a crucial turn on Friday when the former chief of the Special Intelligence Bureau (SIB) and the main accused T Prabhakar Rao surrendered before the Special Investigation Team (SIT) following a directive from the Supreme Court.
The politically sensitive case involved allegations that the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) government had ordered unlawful surveillance of opposition leaders, industrialists, journalists, judges and businessmen.
Rao, who has been dodging the investigation, finally gave himself up today and surrendered before the SIT which is probing the case. The retired IPS official was questioned for several hours by the SIT team regarding his role in phone tapping.
Earlier on Thursday, the SC bench, comprising justice BV Nagarathna and justice R Mahadevan, passed the order directing him to surrender before the SIT at the Jubilee Hills police station by 11 am today. The apex court vacated the interim protection earlier granted to the official, making way for custodial interrogation in accordance with law.
The court also directed that he be allowed to receive food from home and necessary medication during custody.
During the hearing, the Telangana government told the court that despite earlier orders, the former SIB chief had not fully cooperated with the probe, particularly in sharing access to his iCloud accounts and digital data.
It was alleged that the accounts either showed no data or could not be opened. It is feared that crucial digital evidence may have been destroyed or withheld.
Investigators claimed that profiles of several individuals were created without authorisation, surveillance data was used for partisan political purposes, and electronic records were later erased to wipe out evidence.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court had granted interim protection to Rao, allowing him to travel back from abroad while restraining coercive steps, citing his health and travel constraints.
During the probe, it emerged that Rao, in his capacity as SIB chief, had formed an informal team — “Special Operations Team” — within the SIB for carrying out certain specific tasks related to political surveillance to benefit the then ruling BRS and its leaders.
Suspended Deputy Superintendent of Police Praneeth Rao of SIB and his team developed profiles of hundreds of people, and intercepted hundreds of phone calls of several persons, it said.
The accused made requests to telecom service providers for call data records and Internet Protocol Detail Records (IPDRs) in violation of the Indian Telegraph Act and IT Act, and later, anticipating a change in the government, destroyed all the evidence of their illegal activities.
Already, five police officers have been arrested in the case involving illegal tapping of phones of the opposition Congress leaders, businessmen and others when BRS was in power between 2014 and 2023. Those arrested included former Deputy Commissioner of Police at the Commissioner's Task Force, P Radhakishan Rao. He was the chief security officer to former Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao and was later the special task force chief in the city.
Radhakishan Rao confessed before the police that his team had not only tapped the phones of opposition leaders and others but also facilitated ‘transport of money bags in police vehicles’ on the behalf of the BRS leaders during elections.
“We did all this at the behest of top BRS leadership,” he admitted. According to the remand report filed by the police, the arrested cop also revealed that a team of senior police officials was entrusted with the task of tapping the phones of the opposition Congress leaders.
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