BrahMos Espionage Case: Supreme Court Issues Notice On UP Govt's Appeal Against Acquittal Of Former Engineer
The Supreme Court recently (July 13) issued notice on an appeal filed by the State of Uttar Pradesh challenging a Bombay High Court judgment acquitting former BrahMos Aerospace engineer Nishant Agarwal of charges of cyber-terrorism and espionage.
Although the trial was conducted in Nagpur and the appeal against conviction was decided by the Bombay High Court, the Uttar Pradesh government has approached the Supreme Court since the case was investigated by the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), Lucknow (UP).
The matter was mentioned by Uttar Pradesh's Standing Counsel, Advocate Shaurya Sahay, before a bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva, which issued notice to Maharashtra and Agarwal.
It will now be heard on August 31.
Briefly put, in 2018 the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), Lucknow, acted on a tip-off that fake Facebook accounts operating from Pakistan under the names 'Neha Sharma' and 'Pooja Ranjan' were being used to "honey trap" Indian defence personnel. The investigation led to accused Agarwal a recipient of the 'Young Scientist Award', employed at the BrahMos facility in Nagpur.
The prosecution alleged that Agrawal was in contact with these foreign agents and had unauthorizedly copied 'secret' and 'restricted' files related to the BrahMos Supersonic Cruise Missiles used by all defence forces onto his personal laptop and personal hard disc. They argued that he downloaded certain data-stealing malware at the behest of a contact named Sejal Kapoor, thereby creating a conduit for data leakage to Pakistan.
Based on these allegations, the Additional Sessions Judge-1, Nagpur, in 2024 convicted Agrawal under the stringent Section 66-F of the Information Technology Act (Punishment for Cyber Terrorism) and various sections of the Official Secrets Act (OSA), and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Challenging his conviction, Agarwal moved the High Court, wherein it was argued that at the most it can be said that the accused failed to take reasonable care or the accused so conducted himself as to endanger the safety of the information possessed by him. It was therefore argued that the evidence brought on record by the prosecution does not go beyond the offence punishable under Section 5(1)(d) of the Act of 1923. It was categorically submitted that he had merely shared his bio-data on the e-mail of Sejal Kapoor and also chatted with her on the LinkedIn account for the purpose of securing a job in the UK.
The State, on the other hand, argued that Agarwal had given the undertaking to maintain secrecy, and since he had every knowledge about the importance of the documents and the consequences if the said documents were leaked, he was rightly convicted.
Case Details: Anti-Terror Squad, Through Investigating Officer Lucknow Uttar Pradesh vs Nishant|SLP (Crl.) Diary No. 32039/2026
Appearances: Shaurya Sahay, Advocate on Record (Standing Counsel, State of UP)