BrahMos engineer arrested for leaking missile info to ISI
Tuesday, October 9, 2018 IST
LUCKNOW/ NAGPUR: An engineer of BrahMos Aerospace Pvt Ltd associated with its missile projects in Nagpur was arrested on Monday in a joint operation by the Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad (UP ATS), its Maharashtra counterpart and Military Intelligence on charges of passing on classified information about the project to Pakistan’s ISI.
Two of his colleagues, a woman from Kanpur and a man from Agra, are also under the scanner for their suspected role in the racket.
The arrested engineer, Nishant Agarwal, was a senior systems engineer at BrahMos Aerospace’s unit at Butibori, near Nagpur. In his mid-20s, Agarwal headed the Hydraulics-Pneumatics and Warhead Integration wing of BrahMos’ production department.
Highly placed sources in the ATS revealed that Agarwal had used a “coded game” to send vital information to ISI agents in Pakistan. Efforts were on to decode the gaming codes and decrypt the information, the sources added.
UP ATS IG Asim Arun said Agarwal’s name surfaced during the interrogation of BSF jawan Achyutanand Mishra, arrested from Delhi last month after he was honey-trapped.
The UP ATS team landed in Nagpur on Sunday night and swooped down on Agarwal's rented accommodation in Ujjwal Nagar, a middle class locality. According to his neighbours, cops came in a car around 5am on Monday and entered Agarwal’s house by scaling the wall. The ATS team interrogated him till afternoon as curious neighbours stood outside. He was later arrested under the Official Secrets Act.
Agarwal was managing a team of 40 personnel, including systems engineers, technical supervisors and technicians. He was also supervising the new projects at BrahMos’ sites in Nagpur and Pilani, UP ATS officials said, adding that he had won the government’s ‘Young Scientist Award’ for 2017-18.
BSF jawan Mishra is accused of sending photos and videos of 3D model of BSF Academy, arms and ammunition on WhatsApp to an ISI agent. “Following this, we had scanned profiles of some other women on Facebook and found that a woman who impersonated herself as an employee of a US company befriended Agarwal in 2016. She later lured him to work for her by offering a handsome job and salary. Probe revealed that the profile was of a woman belonging to Pakistan,” Arun said.
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