Army Major Passed Classified Information to Pak: Reports

Following Madhuri Gupta case, another case of espionage has come to the fore, this belonging to the military, said media reports.

An Army Major suspected of espionage has been kept in ‘safe custody’ of the Military Intelligence (MI) for over a week now, reports said quoting government sources.

Posted in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the officer is alleged to have passed on classified information to Pakistan, reports said.

According to reports, the first tip-off in the case emerged from American authorities.

The American intelligence agencies first took notice of the suspicious internet traffic when intercepts showed a user in Andaman and Nicobar Islands had dispatched a picture of a serving Indian Brigadier, who was attending a training programme in the US, to Pakistan, said reports.

Swinging into action, Indian authorities fastly focused on the officer and a quiet operation to call him to New Delhi was planned, reports said.

Reports quoted sources as saying that the officer, however, pleaded ignorance of the traffic from his computer to Pakistan saying that it could have been generated by some virus or unknown software.

But suspicion persisted as the Major’s computer had been recently formatted and cleaned of all contents, said reports.

An early forensic examination done in New Delhi revealed the dispatch of classsified military information, some of which should not have been in the officer’s possession, reports said.

The hard disk of the officer’s computer has since been sent by military authorities to a Hyderabad laboratory for accessing the erased contents, said reports.

(Based on internet reports)