THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The
National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing the
gold smuggling
case along with
Customs
, interrogated former secretary to the chief minister and IAS officer
M Sivasankar
here on Thursday. The officer, who is under suspension, was interrogated for four-and-a-half hours by a team of
NIA officers who had come from Kochi.
The agency sleuths issued a notice to Sivasankar by noon on Thursday, on the basis of which the officer appeared at the NIA’s temporary office at the Police Club in Peroorkada by 4 pm. The focal point of interrogation was to find out whether Sivasankar had any role in the smuggling incident apart from the friendship he acknowledged he had maintained with two of the key accused in the case.
It is reliably learnt that NIA had gathered all details regarding trips of Sivasankar both inside the country as well as abroad before questioning him. Inputs gathered from the interrogation of the three accused - Sarith P S, Swapna Suresh and Sandeep Nair -- were also used by officers to crosscheck Sivasankar’s version.
The NIA suspects that the smuggled gold was being used to fund some extremist elements. Earlier, Customs had interrogated Sivasankar for close to nine hours on July 14. It had become clear that Sivasankar had a key role in renting out an apartment for Swapna, where the three main accused had gathered to plan the smuggling.
Expanding their investigation to the Secretariat, NIA officials have sought CCTV visuals from the secretariat to check whether the accused had visited Sivasankar at his office. NIA officials sought visuals from the general administration department’s housekeeping section and the department has replied that the visuals will be handed over to the agency with the permission of the chief secretary.
CM Pinarayi Vijayan, when asked about NIA seeking visuals in the Secretariat, said that the probing agency has all the freedom to do it the way it wants.
From the interrogation of the key accused, it had become clear that the three had maintained close contact with Sivasankar. Also, the two-member committee consisting of chief secretary and finance secretary had found that Sivasankar had close contact with Swapna and helped her in secure a job as operations manager at SpacePark under Kerala State IT Infrastructure Limited, even when she was working as secretary of UAE consular-general.