Source:

June 16, 2014 19:12 IST

Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha on Monday tendered an unconditional apology to Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy for calling him a Central Intelligence Agency agent in a tweet and said that he had no wilful intention to defame him.

The BJP leader had sued him for Rs 3 crore after the tweet was published on April 25 this year. Jha was served a legal notice on May 12. When contacted Jha said that he has tendered a statement of apology to Swamy.

In the apology, Jha said that the tweet by him was "nothing more than a spontaneous enquiry" on the dispatch authored by a US department of state diplomat, which was leaked out in Wikileaks. "Therefore solely to invite discussions in social media to seek perspectives and in good faith, the undersigned had submitted an opinion based this published Wikileaks item.

Hence it was never the intention of the undersigned to malign Dr Swamy, to sully his reputation at all or to defame him," he said in the statement.

Jha noted that the Wikileaks has itself denied any such imputation by it and therefore the source of the said leak does not confirm or even suggest that Swamy is a CIA agent. Maintaining that he had "misread and misunderstood" the Wikileaks disclosure, Jha said he tenders an "unconditional apology" for publishing the impugned tweet" and promised to delete that.

"I, therefore, regret any disrepute or pain caused to Dr Swamy, since that was never my intention and especially so as I hold Dr Swamy in high esteem," he said in the statement.