New Delhi:
Two more private detectives were arrested today in connection with alleged attempt to seek call detail records of Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley, taking the number of arrests in the high-profile case to four.
The detectives, Nitish and Anurag, were arrested from Mukundpur in west Delhi today. Anurag has been a topper at the prestigious Maulana Azad Medical College in Delhi. According to the sources, he is a cyber-expert and well-versed in hacking techniques and has worked with government agencies in the past. He was earlier arrested in the Amar Singh phone tapping case in 2005.
Yesterday, a suspect named Neeraj was taken into custody. The three accused were today sent to three-day police custody. The first arrest over the weekend was of a Delhi constable named Arvind Dabas.
Dabas was arrested for allegedly using his senior's computer to send a request to a mobile service provider seeking information on call detail records (CDRs) of the BJP leader. The police says that in recent weeks, the same gang tried to access the cellphone records of at least 12 politicians, telegraphing "a larger conspiracy."
They say Dabas had on 10 to 12 occasions got the CDRs of persons for the three accused for verification purpose.
The police also doesn't rule out the angle of political rivalry and is trying to determine if the gang was hired by what they described as "someone powerful" looking for information about politicians. They say the names of two BJP leaders from Uttarakhand have surfaced and that these leaders could be questioned. The police say Mr Jaitley's call records were being tracked by Anurag Singh and others for the past two months.
Senior leaders from Mr Jaitley's party the BJP have demanded an apology from the Centre for the alleged phone tapping. "The government should explain why his phone was tapped. Without any reason, the phone of a person cannot be tapped. The government should apologise to Arun Jaitley and should also take stern action against the officials involved in it," BJP's Murli Manohar Joshi told reporters last week.