Phone-tapping case: Ex-SIB chief appears before police for questioning
Prabhakar Rao, who earlier cited ill health and was believed to be in the United States, landed in Hyderabad on Sunday night.
The Supreme Court on May 29 granted interim protection from coercive action to Prabhakar Rao and directed him to appear before the investigating officer. Rao had moved the Supreme Court challenging an order of the Telangana High Court, which dismissed his anticipatory bail plea.
Earlier, a Red Corner Notice was issued against him and his passport was revoked.
On May 20, a Hyderabad court issued a proclamation order against Rao in the phone-tapping case. According to the order, Rao may be declared a "proclaimed offender" if he does not appear before the court by June 20.
Rao, who was 'absconding' in the case, has been accused of forming a "Special Operations Team" under a suspended DSP within the SIB for carrying out certain specific tasks related to political surveillance to benefit the then ruling political party and its leaders.
The suspended DSP of the SIB was among the four police officials arrested by the Hyderabad police since March 2024 for allegedly erasing intelligence information from various electronic gadgets as well as for phone-tapping during the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi regime in Telangana. They were subsequently granted bail. The accused are part of a "conspiracy", in which they allegedly misused the SIB's resources for political purposes by putting citizens from different walks of life under surveillance.
Those named as accused in the case, along with others, had allegedly developed profiles of several people in an unauthorised manner and were accused of monitoring them clandestinely and illegally in the SIB and using them in a partisan manner to favour a political party at the behest of some people. They were also involved in a conspiracy to destroy records to cause disappearance of evidence of their crime, police had said.
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