Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut’s statement recorded in phone-tapping case

An officer from the Colaba police station said that Saturday’s recording lasted nearly an hour.

Shukla was booked in the case last month on a complaint lodged by Rajiv Jain, additional commissioner of police (special branch). The IPS officer faces charges under Section 165 (public servant obtaining any valuable thing, without consideration, from a person concerned in any proceeding or business transacted by such public servant) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 26 of the Telegraph Act.

The first information report states that Shukla had vested political interests in illegally tapping the phones of the senior Sena and NCP leaders, according to a Mumbai police officer. Shukla is now posted in Hyderabad as additional director-general of the Central Reserve Police Force.

In mid-2021, the Maha Vikas Aghadi government appointed a three-member committee headed by acting DGP Sanjay Pandey, who is now the Mumbai police commissioner, to investigate the phone-tapping allegations. The panel identified Shukla’s role in allegedly snooping on state Congress president Nana Patole, over which a case was registered against her on February 25 in Pune, where she was police commissioner between March 2016 and July 2018. Subsequently, the committee found her responsible for the alleged tapping of the phone calls of Raut and Khadse.

Rajiv Jain, the IPS officer who filed the complaint in the matter, was part of the Pandey committee.

“The inquiry committee scrutinised the data available with the state intelligence department and came to know that the phones of Raut, Patole and Khadse were tapped. We suspect phone calls of many other politicians had also been tapped, but their data was subsequently destroyed,” said an officer.

Without confirming the month in which the phone calls were allegedly tapped—Assembly elections were held in 2019—the officer said, “The committee has also identified that she tapped their phone calls for around 15 days in the last three months of 2019.”

The Mumbai crime branch’s cyber cell is also investigating a phone-tapping-related case, which was registered against unknown persons. Shukla’s statement was recorded in the case.