Elgar accused nominate IIT professor to verify documents handed over by Pune police
The verification process will take place in the video conferencing room of the court on January 21
The nine activists arrested in the Elgar Parishad case have nominated computer scientist Supratik Chakraborty, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Powai, to verify seized electronic documents handed over to them by the Pune police.
Chakraborty will be present at the verification, along with advocate Gaurav Jachak, and two accused representing themselves, Surendra Gadling and Arun Ferriera.
Also present will be assistant commissioner of police Shivaji Pawar who is investigating the case, and experts from the Forensic Science Laboratory, Mumbai, who have made cloned copies of the seized documents which were provided to the accused.
The verification process will take place in the video conferencing room of the court on January 21.
“We are only verifying whether the documents are being provided to you or not. Not the genuinity of the documents,” said additional sessions judge SR Navander who is hearing the case.
The nine accused include Gadling, Ferriera, Shoma Sen, Rona Wilson, Sudha Bhardwaj, VV Rao, Mahesh Raut, Sudhir Dhawale, and Vernon Gonsalves.
On Monday, the accused were also provided with a third hard disk containing documents that were recovered from them during their arrest 17 months ago. While five people were arrested in June 2018, four were arrested in August 2018 from various parts of the country by the Pune police.
“These documents are a part of the supplementary chargesheet filed in the case. They were provided in response to the multiple applications filed by the accused,” said ACP Pawar.
In December 2019, each of the accused were provided with two hard disks - one 8TB and one 2TB capacity - with the documents that the prosecution will be relying upon during the trial of the case. However, the accused have claimed that some of the hard disks were not accessible and that the data is incomplete.
While data from the devices seized from all of the accused has been extracted, the data from devices of Bhardwaj, Ferriera, and Gonsalves is awaiting analysis, according to ACP Pawar. The hard disks recovered from Rao have suffered physical damage and will be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in America for recovery.