The chargesheet names four former service officers, including retired Navy Commander Kulbhushan Parashar, a kingpin in the scandal.
NEW DELHI: The CBI filed its first chargesheet in the sensational navy War Room leak case, exposed by DNA last year, on Monday.
The chargesheet, filed before Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Kanwaljeet Arora, names four former service officers, including retired Commander Kulbhushan Parashar of the navy, one of the kingpins in the scandal, and a close associate of Ravi Shankaran. The latter, a nephew of navy chief Admiral Arun Prakash’s wife, is now absconding and has been proclaimed an offender.
The chargesheet also names three sacked military officers: Cdr Vijender Rana and Cdr VK Jha of the navy and Wing Cdr SL Surve of the air force.
Interestingly, however, it omits Captain Kashyap Kumar, former director of naval operations, who too was dismissed but has not yet been arrested. Kumar was the first to move the Delhi high court challenging his dismissal and claiming innocence.
The chargesheet has been filed under section 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code and the Official Secrets Act. The matter has been posted for hearing on July 10. The CBI has not named the two other accused arrested in the case, Raj Rani Jaiswal and Mukesh Bajaj. But the agency told the court that further investigations are on and it may file a supplementary chargesheet today against them.
To date, the CBI has conducted two nationwide raids. The first one was on April 6 when the agency raided 17 places across six cities. The second, which exposed the fact that the leak of classified documents was not limited to the few originally named, was across the nation on June 23 on 19 premises against 14 persons. The chargesheet quotes 68 witnesses and 116 documents, besides mentioning such items as mobile phone records, and two pen drives recovered from Rana and Surve.
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