Is SIT undermining the phone-data evidence?

It is strange that the SIT probing the 2002 riots has undertaken a meaningless exercise to ascertain the ‘authenticity’ of the most potent evidence in its possession — the phone call data contained in the CDs submitted by IPS officer Rahul Sharma.

The probe team had handed over Sharma’s computer to the Directorate of Forensic Science (DFS) to ‘ascertain’ whether the data contained on the CDs was there on the computer’s hard drive, too.

This step of the SIT has raised eyebrows because Sharma himself had told the probe team that any chance of the phone call data being found on his computer’s hard disk, at this point in time, was remote, because the disk had been formatted several times since 2002.

In a report on its examination of the hard disk of Sharma’s computer, submitted to the SIT in March 2009, the DFS has stated that the hard disk does not have any of the phone call data that is being used by the special investigation team (SIT) as evidence against the riots accused. As was to be expected, the DFS report confirms what Sharma himself had told the SIT earlier.

Sharma had collected the phone call data as evidence in 2002 when he was assisting the investigation into the Naroda Patia, Naroda Gam and Gulbarg massacre cases.

The IPS officer first submitted a copy of the phone data CDs in 2004 to the Nanavati-Shah commission. He next submitted a copy of the CDs before the UC Banerji commission. Sharma was required to submit a copy of the phone call CDs to the SIT, which was the third time he was asked to submit the sensitive phone data to an official probe body.

During his deposition before the Nanavati-Shah commission and, later, before the SIT, Sharma had explained how he had collected the phone data from the two cellphone service providers — AT&T and Cellforce — and sent the data to his the then bosses in the crime branch. Strangely, the Nanavati- Shah commission did not attach much importance to the CDs as evidence, for at least three years.

But it was the evidence provided by  precisely these phone data CDs that led to the arrest of former minister and gynaecologist Maya Kodnani and VHP leader Dr Jaideep Patel.
(With inputs from Nikunj Soni)