Kochi: Court employees are set to be questioned by the police over the leaking of the visuals of the sexual assault of the prominent actress in 2017.
Two employees of the Ernakulam Principal Sessions Court will be questioned in the first phase, sources in the Crime Branch said. The court had on April 4 allowed the investigation team to interrogate its staff.
The sheristadar (a court officer) and a clerk who was in charge of keeping material evidence will be questioned in the first stage.
The police sought the permission to question the court staff after a forensic report revealed that the memory cards containing the visuals of the sexual assault kept in the lower court were accessed and their hash value had been changed during the custody of the court.
According to the forensic report, the hash value was changed on December 13, 2018. The Crime Branch sought the court's permission to question the staff who were on duty that day.
(A hash value is a numeric value of a fixed length that uniquely identifies data.)
Plea to cancel Dileep's bail
The Crime Branch, which is probing the 2017 case regarding the sexual assault of the actress, on Tuesday filed a petition before the trial court seeking cancellation of bail granted to actor and co-accused Dileep. The application in this regard was filed after a few rounds of discussion between the investigators and the legal teams.
The probe team reportedly has enough evidence to prove how Dileep, who secured a bail after spending two months in jail in 2017, violated the conditions of bail by trying to thwart the investigation of the case in various ways.
Recent developments
In the past few months, the case has taken numerous twists and turns. In December, a fresh case was registered against the actor and his close associates based on a disclosure made by Dileep's former friend and director Balachandrakumar. The latter claimed that the actor had conspired to do away with a few police officials who were probing the 2017 case.
It was after several rounds of hearing that he got anticipatory bail from the Kerala High Court last month in the latest case, i.e., one registered for the conspiracy to harm cops.
The fresh development has come at a time when the probe team is to set to question the actor's wife Kavya Madhavan who has been insisting that as she was only a witness she should be allowed to depose only at the house and not called to the police station.
