Suspect is an SI who worked at the Police High Tech Cell

The State government on Friday dropped all charges against a major media group accused by the police of promoting enmity between different groups on the ground of religion.

It communicated its stance when the State Police Crime Branch, which had charge-sheeted the sensational case, moved the government for prosecution sanction. The main suspect in the case is a sub-inspector (SI) who worked briefly at the Police High Tech Cell.

The prosecution case was that the SI had leaked to the media a “distorted version” of a classified police document that, arguably, revealed a purported quest by the State Police Intelligence in 2014 to document the email contacts and Internet communication pattern of as many as 268 persons.

Subsequently, a Malayalam weekly run by the media group, which claimed to be in possession of the questionable surveillance list, ran a cover story stating that most of the citizens marked out for secret surveillance by the State Police Intelligence belonged to the Muslim community. It also accused the police of attempting to hack into the accounts of their targets.

The news, which accused the police of religious profiling, put the then United Democratic Front (UDF) government on the defence.

Charges

The State police responded by charging the SI, the media house and two intermediaries, including a lawyer, of conspiracy, forgery and fomenting communal trouble.

Their case was that the SI had tampered with the document to make it appear as if the police were snooping on the members of a particular community.

The police stand on the issue was that the directive was a “routine one” issued to “equate or match” the email addresses of persons of varying importance to the State polity with their identity in the real world.

They had likened the effort to matching cell phone numbers with the address and identity of their users or on spot verification of residential addresses. The police had also denied that they had pressured email service providers to part with the passwords and communication history of the account holders.

BJP reaction

Meanwhile, BJP national security member P.K.Krishnadas has said that the government’s bid to repeal the email snooping case is a threat to internal security. He said this was a clear case of the government yielding to communal and fundamentalist organisations.