The Central government has informed the Supreme Court today that certain documents relating to the Rafale deal have been stolen from the Defence Ministry. A probe has also been initiated into the matter, Attorney-General KK Venugopal said while making a submission before the court.<\/p>\n
Stating that it was “a very sensitive case”, the Attorney-General added that the government was considering invoking the Official Secrecy Act as it deals with “defence purchases” and “involves the security of the state”.<\/p>\n
“It is a criminal offence. We are objecting preliminary because secret documents can’t be annexed with the petition. Review and perjury petitions must be dismissed,” said the Attorney General.<\/p>\n
The petitioners had drawn the court’s attention to an investigative report published by\u00a0The Hindu<\/em>.<\/p>\n Stating that the Rafale-related documents were stolen, the Attorney General added that one of the national dailies had published it after that. He said it would also deter \u201cother countries\u201d from engaging with India as they would become \u201chesitant in doing deals\u201d for all the \u201cmedia attention, public domain and court proceedings\u201d it involved, stated the attorney general.<\/p>\n Review petitions filed by former union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan had urged the apex court to review its earlier ruling of not ordering a probe into the purchase of 36 Rafale jet aircrafts by the Indian government.<\/p>\n The case will next be heard on March 14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Case to be heard on March 14 again<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":279,"featured_media":4723,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"tmauthors":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4722","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/279"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4722"},{"taxonomy":"tmauthors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tmauthors?post=4722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}