Pune: The city crime branch on Monday filed a written submission before the special (NDPS Act) court stating that the data stored in the SIM card of one of the two cellphones seized from former state minister Eknath Khadse’s son-in-law, Pranjal Khewalkar, in the July 27 illegal house party case was deleted by his friend at the instance of his relative.The police filed the submission opposing Khewalkar’s bail application in the case and explained the manner in which the data was deleted from the seized cellphone. “Investigations revealed that Khewalkar used this high-end phone since 2012. It had a SIM card in the name of his friend from Muktainagar in Jalgaon.The police are investigating the purpose behind the use of a SIM card in another person’s name,” the plea stated.Khewalkar and six others, including two women, were arrested after a Pune police team last month claimed to have busted a house party involving the use of cocaine, marijuana and hookah pots, along with liquor, in a studio flat in Kharadi off the Pune-Ahmednagar highway.The police had handed over the seized cellphone to cyber experts on July 31 for extracting WhatsApp account data as part of an internet panchanama exercise. Some incriminating data was then seen in the phone. When the experts resumed the exercise on August 6, they found that the entire data was deleted, the plea stated.The investigators then secured the call data record of this phone afresh and realised that the SIM was in the name of a third person from Muktainagar. “This third person reported ‘theft’ of his phone to the telecom company and secured a new SIM card. He put it in a new cellphone and got all WhatsApp data transferred to it. This way, the data in the seized phone was deleted, and it amounts to destruction of evidence,” the police plea stated.The plea stated that if Khewalkar was granted bail, he might destroy evidence related to the case.
