Ex-top Kerala cop Siby Mathews gets anticipatory bail in 'new' ISRO Spy case

Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 24 Top former Kerala cop Siby Mathews on Tuesday got anticipatory bail from a court here in the infamous ISRO spy case, which has been reopened after the apex court directed the CBI to look into it.

Last month the CBI registered an FIR with the Thiruvananthapuram Chief Judicial Magistrate's Court against 18 people, all of whom had probed the case and includes top former Kerala Police and IB officials, who have been charged with conspiracy and fabrication of documents.

Mathews has been arraigned by the CBI as the fourth accused.

It was after this that Mathews approached the court here and the Thiruvananthapuram district Sessions Court granted him anticipatory bail on Tuesday.

Earlier this month the Kerala high court granted anticipatory bail to four other top officials in the same case.

The ISRO spy case surfaced in 1994 when S.Nambi Narayanan, then a top scientist at the ISRO unit here was arrested on charges of espionage along with another senior ISRO official, two Maldivian women and a businessman.

Mathews, who a decade back took voluntary retirement from the post of director general of police, then served a five-year term as Chief Information Commissioner before retiring and has settled in the state capital city.

Things changed for Narayanan after numerous long-drawn court battles when the Supreme Court in 2020 appointed a three-member committee headed by retired judge Justice D.K. Jain to probe if there was a conspiracy among the then police officials to falsely implicate Narayanan.

The new CBI team arrived last month and according to the directions of the apex court it has to find out if there was any conspiracy on the part of the probe teams of the Kerala Police and the IB to implicate Narayanan.

The CBI freed Narayanan in 1995 and since then he has been fighting a legal battle against Mathews, S. Vijayan and Joshua who probed the case and falsely implicated him.

Narayanan has now received a compensation of Rs 1.9 crore from various agencies, including the Kerala government which in 2020 paid him Rs 1.3 crore and later awarded Rs 50 lakh as directed by the Supreme Court in 2018 and another Rs 10 lakh ordered by the National Human Rights Commission.

The compensation was because the former ISRO scientist had to suffer wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecution and humiliation.

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