Kerala police to quiz Dileep’s wife Kavya; cyber expert arrested

The crime branch team probing the murder conspiracy against police officials, who investigated the sexual assault on a Malayalam actress, on Friday summoned Dileep’s wife Kavya Madhavan, asking her to appear for interrogation on Monday.

The crime branch also arrested cyber expert Sai Sankar who allegedly helped actor Dileep to erase crucial data from his phones.

The move to summon Kavya Madhavan, also an actress, comes in the wake of the crime branch submitting digital evidence before the trial court.

Later one of the audio recordings of a phone conversation was leaked out to media. The purported conversation is between Dileep’s bother- in- law Sooraj and one of his friends, Sharath. In the purported audio Sooraj was heard saying that the assault on the actress was masterminded by Kavya, not her husband Dileep. He also said Kavya took retaliation for some earlier insults she suffered and Dileep was forced to take whole blame.

HT could not verify authenticity of the tape.

Though the crime branch said the cyber expert was arrested from Andhra Pradesh, Sankar later said he surrendered before the investigating team. Earlier the trial court and Kerala high court had turned down his anticipatory bail pleas. He was charged with tampering with crucial evidence and made the seventh accused in the fresh case.

During investigation the crime branch found that vital information from Dileep’s phones were removed and forensic experts later found that one of the laptops used by Sankar was synced with the phones used by the actor. Dileep was asked to surrender his mobile phones on January 31 and later forensic and cyber experts found that some messages and call details were deleted from his phones. Dileep maintained that only some private messages were deleted before surrendering the phones. Further examinations revealed that four phones of the accused were tampered with in a similar fashion.

The fresh case against Dileep, his brother and brother- in-law, and two others surfaced after film director Balachandra Kumar came out with a revelation that he had witnessed a conspiracy to harm investigating officers who probed the actress abduction and assault case of 2017. He also claimed that Dileep had once invited him to see the video of the alleged sexual assault on the woman actor and he met the main accused in the case, Pular Suni, at Dileep’s house in 2016.

Later the crime branch filed a fresh case against Dileep and his relatives. The leading south Indian actress was abducted and assaulted in a moving vehicle in Kochi in 2017 and Dileep is the seventh accused in the first case. The fresh case came up when trial in the first case was about to conclude. The crime branch had sought three more months to complete the probe in the second case.

In the first case Kavya was one of the witnesses.