Engineer at BrahMos Unit Held for Allegedly Leaking Info to Pak
Nishant Agarwal is suspected to have shared classified information about the BrahMos missile system with Pakistan.
An engineer with the BrahMos Aerospace unit near Nagpur was arrested on Monday, 8 October, for allegedly leaking "technical information" to Pakistan, PTI reported.
Nishant Agrawal was nabbed in a joint operation by the Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squads (ATS) at BrahMos' Wardha Road facility, an ATS official told PTI.
The engineer had been living in a rented accommodation on Wardha Road for the last year, his landlord Manohar Kale said. Kale said a police team arrived at the building at 5:30 am and was there till 5 pm.
Kale said Agrawal hails from Roorkee and got married two months ago. "He was staying with his wife here and had given his Aadhaar card copy and a certificate from his employer to me while moving in," he said.
BrahMos – the two-stage missile, the first being solid and the second one, a ramjet liquid propellant – has already been introduced in the Army and Navy, while the Air Force version had witnessed successful trial in May.
BrahMos variants can be launched from land, air, sea and under water. India successfully launched the world's fastest supersonic cruise missile from a Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet for the first time against a target in the Bay of Bengal in November 2017.
The missiles land and naval variants are already in service. At least two Su-30 squadrons with 20 planes each are planned to be equipped with the air-launch variant BrahMos missile, 500 kg lighter than land/naval variants.
(With inputs from ANI, PTI and India Today)
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