Phone tapping case: SIT serves notice to BRS leader Harish Rao for appearance on January 20

Hyderabad: The Telangana Police SIT probing the alleged phone tapping during the previous BRS regime has issued a notice to former Minister T Harish Rao to appear before it here on January 20, police sources said on Monday.

Harish Rao is the nephew of BRS President K Chandrasekhar Rao.

The nine-member SIT, comprising senior officers, is headed by Hyderabad Police Commissioner V C Sajjana.

Responding to the notice issued to Harish Rao, former minister S Niranjan Reddy alleged that the Congress government is misusing power and harassing BRS leaders.

Alleging that the police machinery is dancing to the tunes of the Congress government, he claimed in a release that police officials will have to pay a price in future for their action.

BRS MLC Naveen Rao on January 4 had appeared before the SIT in connection with the case.

Former Telangana intelligence chief T Prabhakar Rao, the prime accused in the case was earlier questioned by the SIT.

A suspended DSP of Telangana Special Intelligence Bureau (SIB) was among four police officials who have been arrested by Hyderabad Police since March 2024 for allegedly erasing the intelligence information from various electronic gadgets as well as for alleged phone-tapping during the previous BRS regime. They were subsequently granted bail.

The accused are part of the alleged conspiracy in which they "misused" the resources of SIB for political purposes by putting citizens from different walks of life under surveillance, police had said.

Those named as accused in the case along with others had allegedly developed profiles of several persons unauthorisedly and were accused of monitoring them clandestinely and illegally in SIB and using them in a partisan manner to favour a political party at the behest of some persons.