CBI filed chargesheet against 5 officials in ISRO espionage case, accused of framing scientist Nambi Narayanan

New Delhi: The CBI has filed a chargesheet against two former DGPs, Kerala’s Sibi Mathews and Gujarat’s RB Sreekumar, besides three other retired police officers for allegedly implicating space scientist Nambi Narayanan in the 1994 ISRO espionage case, officials said. The CBI has filed a chargesheet after three years in the case, which was registered in 2021 following directions from the Supreme Court.

Charge sheet filed against these officers
The CBI has filed a chargesheet against the then Deputy Inspector General of Police Mathews, who headed the SIT probing the 1994 Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) espionage case. Apart from this, a chargesheet was also filed against Sreekumar, who was then Deputy Director in the Intelligence Bureau, PS Jayaprakash posted in SIB-Kerala, then Deputy Superintendent of Police KK Joshua and Inspector S Vijayan.

The Supreme Court gave the order in 2021
Officials said the CBI has charged them under IPC sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 342 (wrongful confinement), 330 (voluntarily causing hurt to extract confession), 167 (framing false documents), 193 (fabricating evidence), 354 (criminal assault on women). The Supreme Court had on April 15, 2021 ordered that the report of a high-level committee on the role of guilty police officers in the 1994 espionage case involving ISRO scientist Narayanan be given to the CBI.

What was the whole matter?
Kerala police had registered two cases in October 1994 when Maldivian national Rashida was arrested in Thiruvananthapuram. She was accused of obtaining confidential drawings of ISRO’s rocket engines to sell them to Pakistan. In this case, Narayanan, the then director of the cryogenic project at ISRO, was arrested along with then ISRO deputy director D Sasikumaran. Apart from this, Rashida’s friend Fauzia Hassan was arrested. These allegations were found to be false in the CBI investigation.