Thiruvananthapuram: The ongoing probe into the gold smuggling case unearthed at the city airport here has now reached the premises of the Kerala Secretariat, the seat of the state government. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) gave a letter to the Kerala chief secretary on Thursday demanding that CCTV footage of the Secretariat between May 1 and July 4 be handed over to the agency. However, the response has been a bit disappointing as the federal investigators have been told that the four surveillance cameras installed in the chief secretary's office had been non-functional as they went up in smoke as lightning struck them in May!
The chief secretary informed the NIA that the additional secretary of public administration’s housekeeping department was responsible for the footage. He then sent an employee from his office to the additional secretary P Honey to get details of the footage.
Honey said that of the 83 cameras in the secretariat, the four at one of the most vantage points were damaged and hence images asked for cannot be provided though they were later repaired.
Honey told NIA officials that the CCTV footage from the CM's office on the fourth floor of the North Block and suspended bureaucrat Sivasankar’s office on the fifth floor was available.
The NIA is investigating allegations that the accused in the gold smuggling case, especially Swapna Suresh, got help in accessing the chief minister's office block by bypassing the strong security system at the Secretariat.
The NIA’s evidence-gathering mission at the Secretariat lasted about an hour.
Footage storage limit
The CCTV system at the Secretariat can store visuals for up to a year. When the system was set up during the V S Achuthanandan government, it had a capacity to store footage of only 14 days.
The previous government enhanced the technical capacity of the system to have footage for up to a year after the Solar case inquiry commission recommended that it should be able to store visuals for up to six months.
Technical experts say footage will not be lost even if a CCTV camera is damaged by lightning.
However, earlier, when CCTV footage was sought after the leader of a pro-Congress organisation in the law department was assaulted by Left activists, the housekeeping department had said that the visuals of that day were not available.
