The Kerala police team probing a murder conspiracy involving popular actor Dileep on Friday arrested a cyber expert who is an accused in the case.
The Crime Branch sleuths arrested Sai Shankar from Andhra. Shankar, arraigned as the seventh accused in the case, has helped Dileep erase some crucial data from his phone, according to the police. He is slapped with charges of tampering with evidence.
The police had earlier this month filed a report arraigning Sai Shankar as an accused before the Aluva Magistrate Court. The investigators zeroed in on Sai Shankar following a forensic finding that a computer used by him was synced with one of the phones used by the other accused.
The Kerala High Court had on March 22 rejected an anticipatory bail plea moved by Sai Shankar saying as on date he had only been summoned as a witness by the police.
Justice Gopinath P further said that the forensic expert - Sai Shankar - is primarily accused of deleting 12 WhatsApp messages from the actor's phone and which according to the petitioner only amounted to destruction of evidence - a bailable offence.
The probe team then learned that the tampering was done by an establishment in Mumbai Dileep and five others were booked under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code, including Sections 116 (abetment), 118 (concealing design to commit offence), 120B (criminal conspiracy), 506 (criminal intimidation), and 34 (criminal act done by several people) for allegedly conspiring to kill and threaten the officials probing the 2017 actress assault case.
Trouble started brewing for the actor ever since his former friend and director Balachandrakumar told the probe team that Dileep had planned to eliminate some police officials who had investigated the actress abduction case.
Based on the revelations, the fresh case was filed and after lot of arguments, Dileep got an anticipatory bail but on a condition that he had to surrender his six mobile phones.
On January 31, the actor surrendered the phones which were sent to the state-run Forensic Laboratory in the state capital.
Further examination revealed that four of the devices had been tampered with.
The actress-victim, who has worked in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam films, was abducted and allegedly molested in her car for two hours by some persons who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17, 2017 and later escaped in a busy area. The entire act was filmed by those persons to blackmail the actress.
There are 10 accused in the 2017 case and police have arrested seven. Dileep was arrested subsequently and released on bail.
