Sudhanshu Sudhakar, a dismissed soldier of the Indian Army, was charged with espionage after he was found carrying secret military documents related to deployment along the western border. He was about to furnish information on the ordnance factory in Nalanda in Bihar when the STF men laid a trap and apprehended him.
Court-martialled in 2007 for improper conduct, Sudhakar is said to have passed on classified information to an ISI man named Rana, based in the Pakistani embassy in Kathmandu.
“As per his confessional statement, Sudhakar started to work for the Pakistani intelligence agency after he was dismissed from the Indian Army on charges of indiscipline and improper conduct,” said Vineet Vinayak, senior superintendent of police, Patna, on Tuesday.
Sudhakar joined the Electrical and Mechanical Engineers Corps at the Secunderabad unit in 2002 and was dismissed from service two years ago because of his involvement in a fake recruitment racket, said army officials in South Block in the national capital.
He admitted that he had supplied documents relating to deployment of troops in Kashmir, details of the army jawans on the Gujarat border and about the high-security zone in Secunderabad where missiles have been deployed. According to Bihar police, incriminating documents were found at Sudhakar’s house at Sitamarhi in northern Bihar bordering Nepal.
An army team from Danapur cantonment in Bihar is in touch with the police to get more information on the espionage. The team has submitted a preliminary report to the Lucknow-based Central Command.
Incidents of spying are not new in the armed forces. Between 2006 and 2008, there were 22 known spy cases in the armed forces, a majority of them being in the army. In three years, the army witnessed 14 spy cases whereas the navy saw nine cases. There were no espionage cases in the Air Force.