Praneeth Rao is in judicial custody.
The case involving arrested former senior police officer Praneeth Rao has become murkier with the cop telling his interrogators that he had destroyed 50 hard drives containing lakhs of intelligence documents on the orders of his former boss, sources have said. The hard drives had been destroyed on December 4 last year, a day after the results of the state Assembly elections were declared.
The police officer has named retired IPS officer T Prabhakar Rao, who was heading the Telangana State Intelligence Bureau, the sources said.
Rao, a former deputy superintendent of police in the SIB had been arrested late on Tuesday night on the basis of a complaint by one of his senior officers, SIB's Additional Superintendent of Police D Ramesh. Mr Ramesh had said he filed the complaint after he found many physical and electronic documents had gone missing.
Sources had told NDTV on Wednesday that Rao had allegedly also illegally tapped the phones of nearly 50 key people, including opposition members, in the state, which was then ruled by the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS). Phones of family members of some people close to the BRS had also allegedly been snooped on.
The SIB is supposed to keep tabs on left-wing extremism, but a team headed by Rao was reportedly gathering political intelligence and details of transactions made by opposition party leaders, the sources said.
The former senior officer is accused of not only erasing 10 lakh call records a day after the elections but also turning off CCTV cameras and replacing the hard drives he had destroyed with new ones.
According to the first information report based on Mr Ramesh's complaint, Rao had two rooms to himself in the SIB and operated with 17 systems. He also had an exclusive and dedicated leased line with an internet connection. Through this setup, he "developed profiles of unknown persons and monitored the same clandestinely, unauthorisedly and illegally", the FIR states.
On Wednesday, Rao was sent to judicial custody for 14 days.