A Lucknow Special Court on Thursday, 11 October sent BrahMos Aerospace engineer Nishant Agarwal – accused of spying and sharing critical details of BrahMos with agencies in Pakistan – to seven days of police custody, ANI reported.
Agrawal, arrested on charges of espionage, was taken to Lucknow by the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of Uttar Pradesh Police on Wednesday, 10 October, an official said.
A court in Nagpur had given the ATS his three-day transit remand on Tuesday.
Agrawal was flown to Lucknow, where the UP ATS will produce him before a special court, a police official said. The ATS will seek his custody from the court for the purpose of interrogation, an official told PTI.
Agrawal was arrested on Monday in a joint operation by the ATS units of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra police at BrahMos' Wardha Road facility in Nagpur, for allegedly leaking "technical information" to Pakistan.
The UP ATS told the court on Tuesday that Agrawal was in contact with two Facebook accounts, operated under the names 'Neha Sharma' and 'Pooja Ranjan', by suspected Pakistani intelligence operatives.
Agrawal has been booked under the Official Secrets Act.
Speaking to the media after the arrest, Chief of Anti-Terror Squad Aseem Arun said, “Very sensitive information was found on his personal computer. We also found evidence of him chatting on Facebook with Pakistan-based IDs.”
As per preliminary information, Aggarwal was allegedly passing on certain highly classified information, including “technological and other details”, to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan as well as the USA.
NISHANT AGGARWAL: A YOUNG SCIENTIST AWARDEE
Working in the technical department of BrahMos aerospace for the past four years, Aggarwal was supervising the BrahMos Nagpur project and was heading a team of 40 system engineers, technical supervisors and technicians.
Aggarwal was recently awarded the ‘Young Scientist Award’ for the year 2017-2018.
Hailing from Roorkee in Uttarakhand, Aggarwal completed his studies from National Institute of Technology in Kurukshetra where he was a gold medallist and a department topper.
According to news agency PTI, Aggarwal got married two months ago and was living in a rented accommodation with his wife in Nagpur’s Wardha Road, from where he was arrested.
Soon after Aggarwal was arrested, his wife was subjected to trolling and hate messages on social media with many users saying that she is “welcomed in Pakistan”.
BRAHMOS MISSILE
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 the Navy, while the Air Force version had witnessed a 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 missile’s 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, which is 500 kg lighter than land/naval variants.
(With inputs from PTI)
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