By Abdul Basith MA, TwoCircles.net,
Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala Police high tech cell Sub Inspector Biju Salim who was earlier suspended for leaking official details to the Madhyamam weekly was arrested on Sunday under charges of leaking official details from the Police headquarters, creating fake documents, cheating, misusing official posts and theft.
The Madhyamam scoop on the Muslim specific cyber surveillance by Kerala police had earlier created lots of controversies as it was observed as the state’s attempt to peep in to the privacy of innocent Muslims, who didn’t even have a petty case against their names.
Biju was suspended on report from high tech cell assistant commissioner N Vinayakumar who accused Salim of leaking the letter sent by Police Superintendent KK Jayamohan to Additional DGP Hemachandran. The letter had reportedly ask the high tech crime enquiry cell to carry out surveillance on 268 email IDs out of which 258 belonged to the Muslim community. Jayamohan’s letter had accused the listed persons of having links with the banned organisation SIMI.
Though the Kerala Chief Minister just after the Madhyamam scoop assured thorough investigations into the case, he later rejected a probe into the case diverting the attention from the real issues of cyber surveillance and instead asked the newspaper to correct itself and keep from creating communal tensions by such sensitive news. The tactic then adopted by the govt was more like ‘email leakage is just a normal procedure, it requires no further investigation’ and the ‘leakage of letter is a grave sin, the one behind it should be put to trial’.
Though CM openly admitted that, SIMI reference in the letter was a mistake from the part of Intelligence SP, no action was taken against him and no investigation was carried out to bring to limelight the conspiracies and agenda behind the email hacking. Instead a crime branch team was deployed just to investigate how the controversial letter sent by Jayamohan got leaked.
The notable thing is that, though Biju was suspended from service long before being found guilty, his arrest was delayed until the Piravam elections are over. The crime branch team on Sunday presented Mr Biju before Thiruvananthapuram First Class Judicial Magistrate – AM Ashraf’s residence and was remanded for 14 days to the Thiruvanathapuram central jail.
Biju on deputation joined the high tech cell last October; he has already passed journalism, PGDCA courses and is an MBA student now.