Two Navy war room leak accused sent to judicial custody till Apr

New Delhi, Apr 19 (UNI) A local court today sent two of the accused in the Navy war room leak case to judicial custody till April 27.

Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Seema Maini sent Kulbushan Parashar and Virender Rana to judicial custody for nine days.

The court also ordered that the proceedings of the case will be in camera and documents relating to the case will not be made public.

The bail application of the other accused -- Vinod Kumar Jha and Mukesh Bajaj-- will come up for hearing on April 21.

Yesterday, special CBI court sent former Wing Commander S L Surve, another accused in the case, to judicial custody till April 27.

A CBI court on April 13 had sent Bajaj and Rajrani Jaiswal, arrested from Pune, and Jha, brought from Muzaffarpur to the Capital, to 14-day judicial custody till April 27.

Five persons, including three former Naval officers, were arrested by the CBI in raids at 17 places across six cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Pune, Goa and Muzaffarpur) on April 6, several months after the sensational 'pilfering' of classified documents from the Naval War Room in Delhi.

Among those arrested include Lt Cdr (Retd) Kulbhushan Parashar, who was picked from the IGI Airport soon after he landed here from London on April 5. The other four arrested were former Naval Commanders Virender Rana (Delhi) and Vinod Kumar Jha (Muzaffarpur) and two civilians -- Bajaj and Jaiswal (both arrested from Pune).

In total, nine people have been accused in the case under the Official Secrets Act.

Besides the five arrested, four others named accused were Lt Cdr (Retd) Ravishankaran, Wing Cdr (Retd) S K Kohli, Ex Wing Cdr (IAF) Sambhajee L Surve and former Captain (Navy) Kashyap Kumar.

The Defence Ministry, in its FIR, had mentioned that three officers of the Indian Navy and another from the Indian Air Force along with retired officers and others conspired to trade off classified documents and information which affected the security of the country.

UNI XC PK RN2015