ISRO espionage case: Mariam Rasheeda and Fauzia Hassan were not spies, Kerala HC told

Kochi: The two Maldivian women, who were arrested and detained along with scientist Nambi Narayanan over the 1994 ISRO spy case, were not spies and were falsely implicated in the matter after one of them denied the advances of one of the officers of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) which was probing the sensational case, the Kerala High Court was told on Wednesday.

The submission was made before Justice Ashok Menon by the lawyer appearing for the two Maldivian nationals after arguments were over from the side of the three former Kerala police officers and a retired Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer in their anticipatory bail pleas.

The CBI had registered a case against the officers and 14 others for various offences such as criminal conspiracy, kidnapping and fabrication of evidence under the IPC.

The CBI too had finished its arguments in which it has claimed that foreign intelligence agencies like ISI, Pakistan, had plotted to derail development of cryogenic technology in India and the accused needed to be interrogated to find out the brain behind the operation.

On Wednesday, the counsel for the accused again refuted the allegations of custodial torture and illegal detention against them as well as Narayanan's claims that the United States of America was behind the entire conspiracy to implicate him in the espionage case.

After their arguments were over, advocate Prasad Gandhi, appearing for the two Maldivian nationals, told the court that no relief should be granted to the accused in the conspiracy case as they had falsely implicated the two women in the spying case back in 1994 and thereby destroyed their lives.

He said that according to the police case diary of the 1994 case, the two women - Mariyam Rasheeda and Fouziyya Hassan - could converse only in broken English and their native tongue and therefore, by no stretch of imagination could they be termed as spies.

He said that Mariyam had gone to the immigration office here to get her visa and tickets extended and no spy would do the same. However, she caught the attention of accused S Vijayan, who was posted there, and he later visited her in the hotel room a few times on the pretext of extending her visa.

He falsely implicated her in the spying case after she resisted his advances, Prasad alleged in court.

After hearing arguments from all sides, the court reserved its order in the anticipatory bail pleas of the four accused - former police officers Vijayan, Thampi S Durga Dutta and R B Sreekumar and retired IB officer P S Jayaprakash. All of them have been granted interim protection from arrest.

The Supreme Court had, on April 15, ordered that the report of the committee, appointed by it, on the role of erring police officials in the espionage case relating to Narayanan be given to the CBI and directed it to conduct further investigations into the issue.

The committee was appointed by the apex court to look into the allegations against the police officers in the spying case.

The espionage case pertained to allegations of transfer of certain confidential documents on the space programme of India to foreign countries by two scientists and four others, including the two Maldivians.

The CBI, in its probe at that time, had held that top police officials in Kerala were responsible for Narayanan's arrest which the agency said was illegal.

The case had a political fallout too, with a section in the Congress Party targeting the then Chief Minister K Karunakaran, who is now dead, over the issue that eventually led to his resignation.