Teltumbde assisted Maoist leader to expand movement: NIA to Court

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The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has submitted before the Special Court that Bhima Koregaon accused Anand Teltumbde assisted his brother Milind Teltumbde, an alleged Maoist leader, to expand the movement and shared “banned literature” from his international conferences with him, reported LiveLaw.

According to The Wire, Milind is known as a “dreaded Maoist” who carries a reward of Rs 50 lakh on his head, and has central and state agencies tracking him closely, as he is believed to be a top-rung leader of the banned CPI (Maoist) organisation.

Opposing Anand Teltumbde’s bail plea before the Special NIA court, the central agency has claimed that he is an active member of the banned CPI (Maoists) and was “deeply involved in furtherance of its agenda”, as per a LiveLaw report.

Further, NIA has reiterated the allegations against Teltumbde, accusing him of being the Convenor of the Elgar Parishad conference on December 31, 2017, that ultimately led to violence at Bhima Koregaon the following day, which resulted in the death of a 28-year-old. As per some media sources, the Police alleged that there was a larger conspiracy to assassinate the Prime Minister and overthrow the government.

LiveLaw reported that NIA also cited a letter written by one Prakash to Anand, that was recovered from co-accused Rona Wilson’s laptop. The letter allegedly mentions “Anand’s visit to Paris for Human Rights Convention to be held on April 9 and 10, 2018 and lectures on Dalit issues in order to give traction to domestic chaos.”

But in a major twist to the NIA’s allegations related to the material found on co accused Rona Wilson’s laptop, a Massachusetts-based digital forensics firm (Arsenal Consulting) revealed that an attacker used malware to infiltrate the laptop and place incriminating evidence on it.

Another revelation was that the firm “connected the same attacker to a significant malware infrastructure which has been deployed over the course of approximately four years to not only attack and compromise Mr. Wilson’s computer for 22 months, but to attack his co-defendants in the Bhima Koregaon case and defendants in other high-profile cases as well.”

This compelled Rona Wilson to move the Bombay High Court demanding a probe into this revelation of the alleged planted evidence.

Teltumbde, who is the grandson-in-law of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar has been in custody since April 2020 and filed his second bail application in January this year. In his plea, as reported by SabrangIndia, he has stated that he comes from a Dalit family and has worked hard to reach a position in his life but “the casteist forces in our society cannot digest this fact and has implicated him in the case in an attempt to belittle his own achievements and to humiliate the entire Dalit community”.

He has denied having any Maoist agenda and stated that he is critical of the Maoist ideology. He has also submitted that he has not met his brother in the last 25 years. His bail plea will now be heard on March 12, as reported by LiveLaw.