The details were made public by investigative websites Cobrapost and Gulail, based on taped phone conversations between IPS officer GL Singhal, Shah and others. The tapes were submitted to CBI by Singhal, who is an accused in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case.
According to tapes played out before the media on Friday here, the "illegal spying" operation was initiated sometime in August 2009, when Shah was Gujarat's minister of state for home, and continued for several weeks thereafter. According to these tapes, Gujarat Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS), where Singhal was an SP, illegally listened in on the woman's mobile phones, had policemen deployed at airport, hotel, and even in hospital where her mother was undergoing a surgery.
Besides the woman, a senior Gujarat IAS officer Pradeep Sharma was also put under illegal watch.
"In the latter half of 2009, when I was posted as SP (operations) in the anti-terrorist squad (ATS) at Ahmedabad, Shri Amit Shah had directed me several times to watch the movements of Shri Pradeep Sharma, who was then posted as municipal commissioner, Bhavnagar. He had also asked me to put a watch on a young woman named Madhuri. I had deputed some men of the crime branch (as ATS was short of subordinate staff) to follow her, as directed by Shri Amit Shah," the investigative websites quoted Singhal as having told the CBI on April 17, 2013.
The websites calimed that for over a month the Gujarat Police apparatus "used its sweeping powers to rigorously monitor every private moment, every personal conversation and every daily movement of Madhuri (name given by the websites). Singhal has told the CBI that the surveillance was illegal and was carried out only on the oral instructions of Shah."
According to recordings played before the media on Friday, the woman was tailed as she visited shopping malls, restaurants, ice cream parlours, gyms, cinema halls, hotels and airports. The recordings also show that she was followed even as she visited her ailing mother in a hospital. When she boarded a flight from Ahmedabad, cops were asked to board the same aircraft so that she was not out of sight even for a moment.
According to the recordings, Shah was keen to know about the men who met the woman, and if she was with some man when she checked into a hotel in Ahmedabad. Not just her phone, but also those of her family and friends were tapped by the ATS, the tapes reveal.
Shah kept collecting information almost real time, while also revealing that his "saheb" had other sources for information on the woman.
According to the tapes, Shah also instructed Singhal to put surveillance on IAS officer Pradeep Sharma. Shah was keen to know if Sharma was meeting with the particular woman. The websites claim that unaware of the existence of these tapes Sharma had independently filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court in May 2011 alleging that he was being framed in bogus corruption cases by the Gujarat government, and among the allegations he mentions is about Narendra Modi's association with a young woman.
"It now emerges from Singhal's statements and tapes that the name of the woman mentioned by Sharma in his petition is the same as the name of the woman who was kept under watch by Shah and company," the websites said in a statement.
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