The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has said it may take serious legal action against Delhi Minister Atishi for the "false, baseless and malicious allegations" she made against the probe agency. The ED in a press release said, "Allegations levelled against ED regarding the deletion of CCTV footage of certain accused persons are completely false and malicious. All statements of the accused persons were recorded under CCTV surveillance and the same were supplied to the accused persons as sought by them and the Ld Trial Court was also provided the same."
"The CCTV footage was however recorded in Video only format as the then available CCTV system did not have the facility to record audio. No audio recording has ever been deleted by ED officials. Audio facility was just not available in the earlier CCTV system of ED. ED records hundreds of statements in quasi-judicial proceedings in a professional manner. Baseless allegations are trumped up daily by APP leaders just to discredit the evidences against their misdeeds," the agency said.
"The CCTV system at ED Office was modernised with latest facilities and upgraded storage facility in Oct 2023 enabling audio recording of the interrogations. Henceforth, interrogation of all the accused persons have been done with audio-video recording including that of Sh Sanjay Singh. In view of these false, baseless, malicious allegations by Smt Atishi Marlena, AAP Minister, the Directorate of Enforcement may take serious legal action," the ED said.
Atishi alleged that the central probe agency had deleted deleted audio from CCTV footage of interrogation in connection with the liquor policy case. The Minister said the ruling BJP was using the ED to "scare and silence" AAP by conducting raids.
"A few days ago, an accused had filed an application in the court seeking the CCTV footage of interrogation. He was made to confront a government witness by the ED and it had happened in a room where there was a CCTV camera. He moved an application since the statement submitted by ED in court was different from what had transpired in that room," she alleged.
"ED had deleted audio recordings of the video footage of interrogation. We have learnt from reliable sources that ED has deleted audio recordings of one-and-half-years of interrogation carried by it in the case," she alleged and challenged the probe agency to produce the recordings in the court.
"We have also demanded in the court that the ED produce video and audio recordings of the interrogation," she said.
Questioning the probe agency, she said, "I have two questions -- What does the ED want to hide? How many statements have been recorded by ED, how many of them are on camera and out of those, which of the statements have audio recordings?"