Centre defending IPS officer Rashmi Shukla in cellphone tapping case: Shiv Sena chief Sanjay Raut

By PTI

MUMBAI: Shiv Sena chief Sanjay Raut on Wednesday claimed the Centre is defending IPS officer Rashmi Shukla who’s being probed for alleged cellphone tapping of sure political leaders. Talking to reporters right here, Raut mentioned be it Maharashtra Congress president Nana Patole, himself or another leaders, all had been labelled “anti-social elements” and their telephones had been tapped.

Some folks had been labelled as “drug peddlers and gangsters” and this occurred when the Shiv Sena-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) authorities was being shaped in November 2019, the Rajya Sabha MP claimed.

“Someone was conducting surveillance on us and trying to find out about the formation of the new government. Our privacy was invaded… One police officer, who is expected to work impartially, was doing it to show her loyalty to one political party and a leader. Now the Centre is protecting her, like always. This is unfortunate,” Raut mentioned with out naming Shukla, a former head of the State Intelligence Department (SID).

The senior IPS officer is dealing with an FIR in Mumbai and is being probed for allegedly placing the cellphone numbers of Raut and former BJP chief Eknath Khadse (who’s now within the NCP) underneath surveillance when she headed the SID.

The Pune police had additionally registered an FIR towards Shukla in reference to alleged tapping of the telephones of Patole. Shukla served because the Pune police commissioner between March 2016 and July 2018.

She is at present posted with the Central Reserve Police Force. In a plea filed within the Bombay High Court in one of many alleged cellphone tapping circumstances, Shukla had claimed she was being “falsely implicated” and referred to as herself a sufferer of “political vendetta”.