New Delhi: The Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra Police has arrested an employee of Mazagon Dockyard Limited (MDL), which builds the Scorpene submarines among other warships, for leaking ‘senstive’ information to a Pakistan-based ‘female’ ISI operative.
The Mumbai-based shipyard also manufactures the specialised high-speed boats now used by the Army in Pangong Tso in Eastern Ladakh to counter the Chinese.
The arrested employee, identified as Kalpesh, was working as a fabricator, ATS sources said, adding that the accused was working with Mazagon Dock on contract and had first joined the company in 2015 over a four-year contract.
“After some gap he rejoined the company and since November 2021, he was leaking information strictly banned as per the Official Secrets Act (OSA),” an ATS officer told ThePrint.
The accused had shared information banned under the OSA with the Pakistani operative between November 2021 and May 2023, the sources said. The employee was contacted by a woman on social media who slowly lured him into giving up critical information.
In a statement Monday, the Maharashtra ATS said that it worked on a confidential input that one individual was leaking “confidential and sensitive information” over WhatsApp and Facebook chats.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been adopting the entrapment route to entrap military personnel for a while, and the forces have been regularly issuing guidelines against such tactics.
The Indian Navy had in 2019 busted a major spy racket leading to the arrest of seven young Navy sailors based in Visakhapatnam, Karwar and Mumbai, who were entrapped through fake Facebook accounts and subsequent chats.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
Also Read: MEA employee working at Indian embassy in Russia arrested for ‘sharing classified’ info with ISI