With the Supreme Court imposing a stay on a virtual anticipatory bail order granted to a police officer who is under investigation in a Bitcoin linked scam case in Karnataka, the police officer Shridhar Pujar has moved the high court afresh for interim bail in the event of his arrest by a Special Investigation Team of the CID. The matter was heard briefly on Tuesday on the petitioner’s side and adjourned.
Earlier on May 24, the Supreme Court of India had stayed a May 2 order of the Karnataka High Court granting virtual anticipatory bail to the deputy superintendent rank police officer who is under investigation by the SIT in a Bitcoin scam case in Bengaluru.
The SIT approached the Supreme Court on May 15 after the High Court on May 2 ordered the release of Pujar, on a surety of Rs two lakh at the end of a day of questioning – despite the officer not seeking bail in his petition in the High Court.
In orders passed on May 24, a vacation bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justice Bela Trivedi and Justice Pankaj Mithal ordered a stay on the May 2 order of the Karnataka High Court but allowed the police officer to approach court for a formal bail by filing a separate plea.
The court issued notices to the deputy superintendent rank officer and others following the plea and said “there shall be stay against the implementation of the impugned order”.
“However, the respondent No.1 shall be at liberty to file a separate application seeking anticipatory bail/bail before the concerned Court and if any such application is filed, the same shall be considered by the Court on its own merits, without being influenced by the impugned order passed by the High Court and/or earlier rejections of the application(s) filed by the respondent No.1,” the Supreme Court bench said on May 24.
The police officer was granted relief by the Karnataka High Court despite the officer not seeking anticipatory bail but asking for the quashing of two cases registered by the SIT, and the quashing of a proclamation order issued against him by a magistrate for evading investigations, the SIT argued in the Supreme Court.
A special court for CID cases in Bengaluru had earlier rejected the bail plea of DSP Shridhar Pujar on February 23 by stating that the Bitcoin scam case involving police corruption in cases filed against an international hacker Srikrishna alias Sriki, 29, in 2020-21 seemed prima facie like instances of “a fence eating the crop”.
“Investigating officer who had the duty to investigate the matters and bring the culprits to book, has used his investigating power to do illegal acts such as illegal detention of accused persons in the earlier case and hacking crypto wallets, websites, gaming apps etc., to make illegal gain,” the special court said while rejecting anticipatory bail to Pujar in February.
The Karnataka High Court bench, while asking Pujar to “join the investigation and cooperate with the investigation process”, also said that the SIT could take him into judicial custody for a day on May 8 for custodial investigation but ordered that the police officer should be released at the end of the day on furnishing of a bond for Rs 2 lakh.
The DSP, who is a former Bengaluru crime branch inspector, and three of his former crime branch colleagues are among four police officers named by the SIT, along with a cyber expert, in an FIR alleging illegal confinement, breach of trust by a public servant, and destruction of evidence filed on January 24, 2024, in connection with the crime branch’s handling of cases following the arrest of a hacker Srikrishna alias Sriki in November 2020.
Srikrishna, 29, was arrested again by the SIT on May 6 this year in connection with the theft of 60.6 Bitcoins valued at Rs 1.14 crore in 2017 from a crypto currency exchange in Tumkur, Karnataka.
The four former crime branch officers accused of wrongdoing in the cases filed in 2020 against the hacker are Sridhar Pujar (now a DySP), inspectors Prashanth Babu, Chandradhar S R and Lakshmikanthaiah along with a private cyber expert K S Santhosh Kumar who assisted the probe in the hacker’s case in 2020.
The investigations in the case have found dozens of procedural lapses by the CCB in its probe against the hacker and his associates – including illegal detention, no documentation of the logins, passwords and data for computer usage by the accused, and even the provision of a laptop worth Rs 60,000 by the police to Sriki to display his hacking skills in police custody.
The handling of the cases involving the hacker by the police under the BJP regime in Karnataka after the arrests in November 2020 resulted in allegations of corruption by the Congress when it was in the opposition between 2020-2023. The SIT was constituted by the Congress government on June 30, 2023, after it came to power, to probe the Bitcoin scam.
Sriki has said in police statements that are on record in charge sheets filed by the crime branch that he was forced to handover all crypto currency in his possession to the police after he was in police custody between November 2020 and January 2021.
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