A Nagpur court handed life imprisonment to ex-Brahmos Aerospace engineer Nishant Agarwal on Monday. He had the charges of spying for Pakistan’s ISI.
On charges of leaking information about Brahmos missile to Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI, Nishant Agarwal was arrested in 2018. He was a senior system engineer with a joint venture between DRDO and Russia’s Military Industrial Consortium (NPO Mashinostroyenia), Brahmos Aerospace, that worked on India’s supersonic cruise missile, which could be launched from land, air, sea and underwater.
The case in 2018 created a ripple as it was the first spy scandal that hit Brahmos Aerospace. Nishant was in touch with suspected Pakistani intelligence operatives through two Facebook accounts — Neha Sharma and Pooja Ranjan. These accounts, based out of Islamabad, were believed to be run by Pakistan’s intelligence operatives.
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ISI spy’s Background
His colleagues were shocked with such an activity as Nishant was a winner of the Young Scientists award by the Defence Research and Development Organisation. Studied at the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, he was known to be a bright engineer.
Cops who investigated the case said, though he was engaged in highly sensitive work, Nishant made himself an easy target by his casual approach on the internet.
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