A special court in Mumbai on Tuesday allowed the National Investigation Agency (NIA)’s plea to send phones of seven accused in the Bhima Koregaon caste violence case of 2018 to the Supreme Court appointed committee looking into the allegations of unauthorised surveillance of Pegasus.
On October 27, 2021, the Supreme Court had constituted a technical committee comprising of Prof. Naveen Chaudhary, Prof. P Prabhakaran and Prof. Ashwin Gumaste overseen by Justice R.V. Raveendran, former judge of the Supreme Court.
The technical committee requested the director general of the NIA on January 30, 2022 to arrange for mobile phones of accused – Sudha Bharadwaj, Rona Wilson, Hany Babu, Shoma Sen, Anand Teltumbde, Vernon Gonsalves and Varavara Rao as it was informed to the committee that their phones have been allegedly infected by the Pegasus spyware.
Digital copies
The NIA’s application mentions, “The committee will make the digital copies in the presence of the officer producing the same and return the instruments immediately thereafter a set of copies of the digital images will also be made available to the officer producing the mobile instruments. The digital copies of the said mobiles will also be furnished to the advocates for the purpose in custody.”
On December 17, 2021, a report was released by the U.S. forensic investigation firm Arsenal Consultancy that revealed that accused Mr. Wilson’s cell phone was attacked by the Pegasus spyware 49 different times and was successful in infecting his phone before his arrest on June 6, 2018, in the case.
