The Crime Branch (CB) late Tuesday night arrested five Mangalam TV journalists on the suspicion of having deceptively recorded and broadcast an audio sex tape targeting former Transport Minister A.K. Saseendran.
They are chief executive officer R. Ajith Kumar, ‘investigation team’ leader R. Jayachandran, alias S. Narayanan, news coordinating editor M. B. Santosh, Firoz Sali Muhammad and S. V. Pradeep, both news editors and presenters.
The CB said their arrest was ‘imperative’ for the investigation. Channel chairman Sajan Varghese and two other journalists, Rishi. K. Manoj and Lakshmi Mohan, were let off after questioning. They still remain accused in the case.
The agency said more persons could be involved in the conspiracy that resulted in the resignation of the Minister. Some of them could have provided technical aid and space to slyly record the conversation. The scope of the probe would expand in the coming days.
The agency suspects the conversation was recorded outside the studio. Efforts were on to identify the location. The clarity of the audio indicated that the cell phone was linked to a sound capturing device.
The CB would rely on cell phone call data analysis to retrace the digital footprints of the accused, before and after the offence, in an attempt to reconstruct the crime and generate a timeline. The prosecution case was that the accused had hatched a plan to angle for a sensational news to accord the channel a decisive advantage over its competitors on inaugural day on March 26.
To further it, they created an investigation team, which employed a woman staffer to record the conversation, apparently on a mobile phone early this year.
The conversation was ‘edited and transferred’ to a pen drive and ‘brought’ to the studio for broadcast on the day of its launch on March 26. The agency has seized the device as “evidence” and also cloned the channel’s servers for forensic examination. Meanwhile, Mr. Ajithkumar reported the loss of his laptop and mobile phone to the police late on Monday.
