HC quashes two phone tapping cases filed against IPS officer Rashmi Shukla

In a relief to senior IPS officer and Maharashtra's former intelligence chief Rashmi Shukla, the Bombay High Court on Friday quashed two FIRs registered against her for alleged illegal phone tapping.

Two first information reports (FIRs) were filed against Shukla - one in Pune and another at Colaba in south Mumbai - for allegedly illegally tapping the phones of opposition leaders when Devendra Fadnavis was the chief minister of the state.

The FIRs were registered when the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government was in power.

On Friday, Shukla's counsel Mahesh Jethmalani informed the high court that in the Pune FIR, the police had submitted a C-Summary report (case is neither false nor true) and had sought to close the case and in the Mumbai case, the government had refused to grant sanction to prosecute Shukla.

A division bench of Justices A S Gadkari and Sharmila Deshmukh accepted this and quashed the two FIRs.

The Pune case was registered for allegedly recording phone calls of Congress leader Nana Patole, while the Mumbai case was for recording phone calls of Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Sanjay Raut and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Eknath Khadse, who was earlier with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).