The four accused, arrested in the corporate espionage case, were on Monday remanded in judicial custody till March 6 by a city court. The accused, however, alleged that they were forced to sign blank papers by police during their custodial interrogation.
The accused — lalta Prasad and Rakesh Kumar, Prayas Jain and Santanu Saikia — were produced before Metropolitan Magistrate Dheeraj Mittal after expiry of their police custody.
The Crime Branch of Delhi Police said they be remanded in 11-day judicial custody as they were not required for further interrogation at this stage. During the hearing, the counsel appearing for these four accused told the magistrate that their clients were forced to sign five-six blank papers during custodial interrogation.
At this, the magistrate individually asked four accused whether they were forced to sign papers or not. Responding to the court’s query the accused said they were made to sign blank papers by the interrogators.
During the hearing, defence counsel also contended that the court should sign the case diary of the matter. The court allowed the plea and directed the IO to get the case diary signed by it.
The court also allowed the submissions of defence counsel to meet their clients for 10 minutes each. The Crime Branch had earlier told the court that these four persons, along with other three arrested persons, were passing certain “sensitive documents” to some corporate houses to benefit them.
The other three accused —Ishwar Singh, Asharam and Rajkumar Chaubey — were on February 20 remanded to judicial custody for two weeks.
Detailing the alleged roles of accused, police had said Chaubey was driving the car in which “secret and confidential” documents were recovered while Asharam and Ishwar Singh used to pass on information from the Petroleum Ministry to him.
Asharam, who was working in the Petroleum Ministry, used to switch off the CCTV cameras installed in the ministry after which his sons Prasad and Rakesh used to enter the premises by using fake entry cards which they had procured by paying Rs4,000 each, the police had said.
Regarding Saikia, police had said a huge amount of documents were recovered from his possession while Prasad used to illegally trespass in the Petroleum Ministry to procure the documents.