In 2016, he claimed to have hacked details of Khadse's calls with Dawood Ibrahim, but cops claim he manufactured proof
Manish Bhangale
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It has been a good week for Eknath Khadse. Just a day after exacting payback in the state Assembly against his own party's energy minister with snippy jibes, he was further redeemed when 'ethical hacker' Manish Bhangale was arrested for alleging last year that Khadse had a direct connection to Dawood Ibrahim and had seven phone conversations with him over a span of a year.'
Bhangale, who hails from Vadodara and resides at Ghodbunder Road, Thane, was arrested on Thursday. His laptop and two cellphones, suspected to have been used to commit the crime, were also seized.
Charges, counter charges
In May 2016, Bhangale claimed to have accessed phone calls between Dawood and Khadse by hacking into the authentication process of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd (PTCL) a month before.
To support his claim, Bhangale presented some itemised telephone bills of two Pakistani landline numbers, registered on the name of Mehjabeen Shaikh — Dawood's wife. He had also produced documents showing seven calls between these two landline numbers and Khadse's phone number between April 5, 2015 and March 5, 2016.
The case was initially investigated by state ATS, and later handed over to the Mumbai crime branch. Investigations by the cyber cell, went on to procure Khadse's phone records from Idea, and revealed that neither incoming or outgoing calls from Khadse's phone were made to Pakistan or the numbers mentioned in the bills produced by Bhangale.
Police says
"On verification, the documents he produced turned out to be fraudulent. He did this by way of spoofing [in cyber crime, a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data]," said joint commissioner of police, (crime) Sanjay Saxena.
In this case, Bhangale had created an email id 'mehajabeenshaikh9xx@gmail.com' and committed the offence. Meanwhile, Bhangale is not cooperating in the probe and the police are still attempting to determine his motive for attempting to defame Khadse. Sources said that though the possibility of any political conspiracy cannot be ruled out, developments in the case so far indicate that it could be a possible attempt for publicity.
Bhangale has been booked under sections 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 471 (using as genuine a forged document) of the IPC and 66D (punishment for cheating by personation by using computer resource) of the Information Technology Act.
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