The court upheld allegations against the accused under the Indian Telegraph Act, IPC and IT Act, emphasizing threats to national security and illegality of parallel telephone exchanges.

ORDER

These are Miscellaneous cases filed under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure seeking to quash Crime Nos. 543/2021 and 542/2021, both of Kasaba police station, 320/2021 of Nallalam police station, 539/2021, 540/2021 and 541/2021 of Kasaba police station in Kozhikode city respectively. Petitioner is the fourth accused in all these crimes. Since the parties and allegations are the same, all these cases were heard together and are disposed of by this common order.

2. Originally, all these crimes were registered alleging offences under Sections 4 read with 20 of the Indian Telegraph Act , Sections 3 , 6(1), 6(1A) of the Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act and Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code . All these crimes were registered on 02.07.2021 alleging cause of action on 01.07.2021. The allegation is that on 01.07.2021, on various times the petitioner and others were found running parallel telephone exchanges in six different locations. The mode of operation is said to be that the accused persons were found using multiple broad band connections and intentionally converted international phone calls and other phone calls by terminating those calls and bypassed them to local calls, with the help of illegal call routing Gateway devices, by inserting pre-activated SIM cards, without knowledge or consent of the SIM card owners, and thus conducted illegal and fraudulent activities to acquire unlawful gain with dishonest intention, by which they cheated various telecom service providers in India, accessed, tampered, altered and diminished the value of telecommunication network of the country and thereby caused huge monitory loss to the Government and the service providers by installing parallel telephone exchanges at different locations in Kozhikode. According to the petitioner, except of the IPC , all offences are bailable, since they attract either fine only or imprisonment upto three years.

Elements of Section 420 of the IPC are not attracted at all; however has been incorporated purposefully with the intention of making the offence non-bailable. So, the petitioner contends that incorporation of of the in the crimes is per se illegal, arbitrary, with the intention to cause intense harassment to the petitioner which is gross abuse of process of the court and therefore, sought to be quashed.

3. During the course of investigation, the learned Senior Public Prosecutor submitted that apart from the above stated offences, offence under Section 66F of the Information Technology Act , for short the I.T. Act, also has been incorporated. Then an amendment was brought to the Crl. M.C.s and now the petitions are for quashing the offences under Section 420 of the IPC and Section 66F of the I.T. Act in the above crimes. All these cases are being investigated by the Assistant Commissioner of Police, District C Branch, Kozhikode city. The Assistant Commissioner of Police, District C Branch filed a statement of facts.

4. According to him, during the course of investigation, the Additional Director General of Department of Telecommunication and the AGM of BSNL inspected the SIM boxes and issued separate certificates which form evidence in each case. They testified that the use of seized equipments from the possession of the accused is illegal, that they were operating the gadgets without taking ILD licence from the DoT that such setups cause 8% revenue loss to the licensed ILDOs and the GoL and Government of India has lost one time entry fee of Rs. 2.5 crores towards ILDO licence in each case. That such setups pose security threat to the Natio