Mumbai: Manish Bhangale, the ethical hacker who had claimed last year to have found evidence of contact between BJP leader Eknath Khadse and international terrorist Dawood Ibrahim, was charged with forgery and arrested on Thursday .
In a press conference in May last year jointly addressed by Mr. Bhangale and AAP spokesperson Preeti Sharma Menon, the former had claimed to have accessed the records of a Pakistani telecom company which showed Mr. Khadse had been in touch with Dawood. Investigations by the Mumbai Police and the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad had yielded no evidence to support these claims, and the Cyber police station was subsequently instructed to look into the matter.
“We examined the purported evidence that Mr. Bhangale claimed to have obtained from the Pakistani company and found the documents were forged using editing software. We registered a case against him earlier this month and he was arrested on Thursday,” an officer with Cyber police station said.
Mumbai Police spokesperson DCP Ashok Dudhe added, “Mr. Bhangale has been charged with forgery under the IPC along with relevant sections of the Information Technology Act.”
He was produced in court on Friday and remanded in police custody till April 6. The police are questioning him to ascertain motive. “There was clearly some motivation to target Mr. Khadse. We are ascertaining if the accused did it for reasons of his own or if he was motivated to do so by some other person,” an officer said.
On the day Mr. Bhangale made the allegations, the Mumbai Police Crime Branch had examined Call Data Records of Mr. Khadse's number mentioned by Mr. Bhangale in his claims for the period between September 2015 and April 2016 — the duration mentioned by Bhangale in his allegations — and did not find any calls, incoming or outgoing, exchanged with any Pakistan-based number. The ATS, too, had initiated an inquiry and had summoned Mr. Bhangale for inquiries, but he didn’t respondnever.
