Four-year-old scandal comes back to haunt NTRO

By IANS,

New Delhi : India’s hi-tech spy agency National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) finds itself battling revelations that one of its staffers illegally snooped on his seniors using a spycam in its headquarters’ toilet four years ago. The staffer was dismissed after a probe, government sources said Wednesday.


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The revelations come at a time when NTRO, set up in 2004 to get advanced information on 1999 Kargil-type intrusions by enemy troops, is caught in another scam involving procurements. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on this has been with the Prime Minister’s Office since July.

Following the spycam-in-the-loo episode in 2007, the NTRO ordered a probe that led to the sacking of an former Indian Air Force (IAF) corporal, who was held guilty of fitting the snooping devices in the NTRO headquarters’ toilet, government sources said.

The IAF corporal was found to have linked the spycam to his computer, on which he had downloaded images from the toilet, which is located on the second floor of the NTRO headquarters building.

The toilet was being used by all top officials of the agency, including some women, sources said.

The illegal internal snooping was busted accidentally in September 2007 after a woman staffer found the recordings in a file on the IAF corporal’s computer, on a day he was on leave.

The discovery alerted the NTRO top brass after the woman staffer raised an alarm and lodged a written complaint with her superiors, sources said.

The NTRO top brass then ordered a probe into the episode and it came out with evidence, including VCDs containing recordings from the spycam, that the snooping had been on for about a month.

However, some employees of NTRO believe that the camera was in place for over a year in the toilet. NTRO then sought and obtained the IAF corporal’s resignation.

The corporal, a computer expert, was involved in preparing sensitive identification systems for the NTRO.

Surprisingly, the whole episode has come out in the open only now, after almost four years.

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