Forensic report concludes texts and emails sent from Rajendra Pachauri’s devices were not fabricated as he had claimed

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Delhi police have found no evidence that laptops and mobile phones belonging to a former chairman of a UN panel on climate change accused of sexual harassment were hacked by third parties.

Rajendra Pachauri, who was head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when it was awarded the Nobel prize in 2007, was formally charged last March with sexual harassment, stalking and intimidating a former employee at the Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), an energy and environment research centre he led for more than three decades.

He has denied the charges and claimed they are partly based on emails and text messages that were fabricated or altered by hackers.

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Pachauri, 76, resigned as head of the IPCC in February 2015 after the woman, who cannot be named, first lodged a police complaint about his alleged behaviour towards her.

The woman, who was 29 when she started working at Teri in late 2013, reportedly told police that Pachauri had deluged her with offensive messages, emails and texts and made several “carnal and perverted” advances over the 16 months they worked together.

An internal investigation into the complaints conducted by Teri questioned more than 50 employees and concluded the woman’s claims were “valid”.

She submitted several thousand electronic messages as evidence, which Pachauri has claimed were tampered with by “unknown cyber criminals”, possibly as part of a co-ordinated campaign against him.



Last March police filed a 1,400-page charge sheet against Pachauri that cited the text message and testimony from 23 witnesses, many of them Teri employees.

Judge Shivani Chauhan said there was evidence “the accused … made sexually coloured remarks upon the complainant on several occasions”.

“He touched the complainant inappropriately, despite a clear expression of disapproval from her side. He also sent inappropriate SMS and WhatsApp messages to the complainant,” she said at the time.



A forensic report commissioned by the Delhi police and lodged with the court on Wednesday found there was no evidence that Pachauri’s devices had been hacked, nor that emails and other electronic messages sent from his accounts were fabricated by a third party.



The Gujarat-based lab examined seven of Pachauri’s devices and concluded “malware/key logger/spyware were not found present/installed”. “Any suspected/unusual activities was not seen in the cell phone,” the report said.

“Any suspected/unusual activities was not seen in the event log of the computer storage media hard disks.”

Nor was there any evidence the devices or data were interfered with in transit between Delhi and the forensic lab in Gandhinagar, it added.

The case has attracted significant international attention because of Pachauri’s prominence as a climate-change authority. Among women’s groups in India the case has brought prominence to the issue of sexual harassment Indian women face in work and public spaces.



The case is not expected to proceed to trial for at least a year, its progress hampered by frequent delays in India’s overburdened justice system.

Lawyers for Pachauri and his accuser said they had yet to see the report and declined to comment. The next hearing is scheduled for 14 July.