Osmania University police seized two computer hard discs from the office of 4TV Urdu news channel in Old City on Saturday.
The seizure was part of the investigation into the case of alleged hate speech by the MIM floor leader Akbaruddin Owaisi at a meeting held in Nirmal in December last.
A special team led by Inspector K. Madhu Mohan Reddy, which went to the office at Gulzar houz, was told by the channel management that the technician concerned was not available and hence they would submit the hard discs soon.
However, the Inspector insisted that the hard discs were essential in building up evidence in the case.
Earlier, 4TV, MQ, Ruby and UrduTV channels, which had telecast Mr. Akbaruddin’s speech, presented VCDs of the same, but the police decided to collect the original and unedited version of the speech recorded by the channels.
This would help in establishing that the speech visuals presented by the police were not tampered with and were original as recorded by the channels, a police officer said.
Police, however, didn’t find the video footage of Mr. Owaisi’s speech in the two hard discs they had seized.
The channel employees maintained that the video footage would get deleted from the hard discs, if storage limit was exceeded.
Irrespective of their explanation, the investigators are sending the seized hard discs to forensic science laboratory for retrieval of the video footage.
