Supreme Court Grants Anticipatory Bail To Former Telangana Intelligence Chief As Probe In Phone Tapping Case Complete

The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted anticipatory bail to former Telangana State Intelligence Bureau chief T Prabhakar Rao in the alleged illegal phone tapping case.

A bench of Justice BV Nagarathna and Justice R Mahadevan granted the relief after the State submitted that the investigation was almost complete, and Rao stated that he had complied with all orders of the Court and cooperated with the investigation.

“In light of the submissions, we dispose of the appeal by making absolute the interim protection which was granted to the accused…”, the Court stated.

When the matter was called out, Senior Advocate Sidharth Luthra, appearing for the State, submitted that the interim protection from arrest earlier granted to Rao may be made absolute while keeping the question of law regarding maintainability of the anticipatory bail plea open. He informed the court that the investigation is almost complete and an additional chargesheet will be filed against Rao in the coming days.

Background

Rao is accused of intercepting the phones of politicians, high court judges and others to aid the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi government.

In December last year, the Court directed Rao to surrender before the investigation officer at Jubilee Hills Police Station, Hyderabad for custodial interrogation after the State alleged that no electronic data could be recovered from Rao's iCloud accounts and that he had deleted electronic evidence while enjoying interim protection from arrest granted by the Court. Thereafter, Rao underwent custodial interrogation for two weeks on the Court's orders.

The State also alleged that Rao had not complied with the Court's earlier direction to reset all his iCloud passwords. In October, the Court had directed him to reset and share the passwords with the police in the presence of forensic experts after the State claimed that he had formatted his devices and destroyed evidence while under interim protection from arrest.

The State alleged that the data was destroyed prematurely and that hard disks were destroyed and thrown into a river. The State also told the Court that no data was found in Rao's iCloud accounts and that Apple had confirmed activity on those accounts before he appeared for investigation. It further alleged that some email addresses supplied by Rao did not open.

Rao maintained that the deletion of data took place under official protocol on the basis of orders of a Review Committee due to the sensitivity of the information. He told the Court that the minutes of the Review Committee meeting dated December 2, 2023 would support Rao's position that the data was deleted on the committee's direction. Kumar also submitted that one of the iCloud accounts could not be reset because the associated United States mobile number had been deactivated and could not be reactivated.

At that stage, the Court directed Rao to surrender for custodial interrogation while clarifying that his anticipatory bail plea would remain pending and would not become infructuous.

The bench has now granted Rao anticipatory bail in light of the State's submission that the investigation is almost complete and Rao's statement that he has complied with the Court's directions and cooperated with the investigation.

Case no. – SLP(Crl) No. 7354/2025

Case Title – T. Prabhakar Rao v. State of Telangana