Hyderabad: Syed Shuja, the self-proclaimed cyber expert, who made shocking allegations on EVM rigging in 2014 elections, was never part of the team at Electronic Corporation of India (ECIL), like he claimed, the company clarified on Tuesday.

Not just Syed Shuja, but none of the team members mentioned by him were part of the engineering team that dealt with EVM manufacturing at ECIL, sources the company.

"The records of this company have been verified and it is found that Syed Shuja has neither been on the rolls of ECIL as a regular employee nor was he in any way associated in the design and development of EVMs in ECIL produced between 2009 to 2014," read a statement from ECIL.

Shuja, during the press conference in London, claimed he was part of a team at the public sector ECIL, which designed and developed the EVMs. Although he appeared on screen through Skype, his face was masked.

Shuja had mentioned a few names claiming to be his team. The names were Prakash, Keshav, Vamshi, Amjas. And none of these people or engineers with such names were employed with the team, the company further said.

Shuja said he fled India in 2014 because he felt threatened in the country after the killing of some of his team members.

Saying that there could be no question about authenticity of EVM manufactured at ECIL, it needs to be understood that no part of the manufacturing work of EVMs is accessed or assigned to contract or outsourced employees, a former engineer who was part of the team and who wished to be unnamed told News18.

Shuja also alleged that former Telangana BJP MLA Kishan Reddy was aware of the rigging and his gunmen had shot down few of Shuja’s teammates in Hyderabad in 2014. The team had gone to meet Kishan Reddy to talk about rigging and the meeting was scheduled in the outskirts of Hyderabad.

"If I got so many people killed then what was the government doing at that time? This is absolutely false. I demand a CBI inquiry into this,” Kishan Reddy told News18 on Tuesday.