Earlier this year, former BrahMos scientist Nishant Agrawal received a life sentence from a sessions court for divulging military secrets to Pakistan. Agrawal, who worked in the missile assembly unit in Nagpur, was a highly acclaimed missile engineer. The sessions court convicted him under Section 235 of the Criminal Procedure Code, finding him guilty of offenses under Section 66(f) of the IT Act and various sections of the Official Secrets Act (OSA) for leaking sensitive armament information to foreign entities.
During the trial, UP-ATS investigation officer Pankaj Awasthi testified that a person named ‘Sejal’ had created a Facebook account from Pakistan. Using this account, she communicated with Pakistani operatives and targeted Indian individuals. The chats revealed that she was part of a network that shared information and strategies to deceive Indian defense personnel.
Awasthi stated in court that under Sejal’s instructions, Agrawal clicked on links she provided and installed three apps on his personal laptop in 2017: Qwhisper, Chat to Hire, and X-trust. These apps were malware designed to extract data from Agrawal’s laptop, which contained classified information. Investigations uncovered critical documents related to the BrahMos missile on his personal computers, breaching BAPL’s security protocols.
Additionally, Agrawal reportedly communicated with Sejal on LinkedIn, where she posed as a recruiter for the UK’s Hays Aviation and expressed interest in hiring him.
Agrawal was arrested in October 2018 during a joint operation by Military Intelligence (MI) and the Anti-Terrorism Squads (ATS) of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. At the time of his arrest, he was employed in the technical research division of BAPL, an Indo-Russian joint venture responsible for manufacturing BrahMos missiles. BrahMos Aerospace is a collaborative effort between the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Russian military-industrial consortium NPO Mashinostroyenia.