Justice K Babu, while granting the anticipatory bail again, directed the accused to appear before the investigating officer on 27 January.
The Kerala High Court granted anticipatory bail to the accused in the case in August 2021 but this was later quashed by the Supreme Court. (Wikimedia Commons)
The Kerala High Court on Friday, 20 January, granted anticipatory bail to five people, including former Kerala DGP Siby Mathews, in connection with the 1994 ISRO espionage case.
The Supreme Court on 2 December, 2022 quashed the high court’s earlier order (in August 2021) granting anticipatory bail to the accused and remanded the matter back to the high court, directing it to decide the issue within four weeks.
Justice K Babu, while granting the anticipatory bail again, directed the accused to appear before the investigating officer on 27 January.
The high court directed the CBI to grant the accused bail in case they were arrested on that day and asked the accused to continue appearing before the investigating officers every Monday and Friday for the next two weeks after that.
The court also banned the accused from travelling abroad and granted bail on sureties worth ₹1 lakh.
On 2 December last year, the apex court had directed the high court to decide the petitions “afresh on its own merits”.
The Supreme Court directive came on the CBI’s appeal against the high court order granting bail to former Kerala DGP Siby Mathews, former Gujarat DGP RB Sreekumar, two former Kerala police officers S Vijayan and Thampi S Durga Dutt, and retired intelligence official PS Jayaprakash.
Sreekumar was then the deputy director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB).
The CBI had said that its probe found that some scientists were tortured and framed in the espionage case, due to which the development of a cryogenic engine was hit, thereby setting India’s space programme back by almost a decade or two.
The CBI earlier alleged that there was a clear indication that the accused were part of a team that had ulterior motives to torpedo the attempts of the ISRO to manufacture the cryogenic engine.
The CBI had registered a case against 18 people for various offences, including criminal conspiracy, in connection with the arrest and detention of famed scientist Nambi Narayanan in the espionage case.
The case, which made headlines in 1994, pertained to allegations of transfer of certain confidential documents on India’s space programme to foreign countries by two scientists and four others, including two Maldivian women.
The CBI had said that the then-top police officials in Kerala were responsible for Nambi Narayanan’s illegal arrest.
Narayanan, who was given a clean chit by the CBI, had earlier alleged that the Kerala police had fabricated the case and said that the technology he was accused of stealing and selling in the 1994 case did not even exist at that time.
The apex court, on 14 September 2018, appointed a three-member committee while directing the Kerala government to cough up ₹50 lakh as compensation for compelling Narayanan to undergo “immense humiliation”.
(Disclaimer: The headline, subheads, and intro of this report along with the photos may have been reworked by South First. The rest of the content is from a syndicated feed, and has been edited for style.)
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