Eight former Indian Navy personnel being tried in Qatar have been accused of spying on the oil-rich kingdom’s secretive programme to obtain Italian-made, high-tech submarines coated with metamaterials that make their detection by adversaries difficult, intelligence sources have told ThePrint.

Legal proceedings against the eight officers were reported to have begun on 29 March, and the next hearing is scheduled for May.

Fincantieri SpA, a Trieste-based shipbuilding firm, was contracted to deliver two submarines in 2021, making the emirate the first Arab state to operate undersea vehicles. Qatar had also placed orders for four corvettes and a helicopter carrier, as part of a major naval buildup.

“We’ve tried hard to convince our counterparts in Doha that India and its nationals were not involved in hostile intelligence operations against the emirate,” an intelligence officer told ThePrint on condition of anonymity. “But the Qataris are insisting that intelligence on their submarine programme was passed on to Israel.”

The Qatar State Security, the state intelligence agency, claimed to have intercepted electronic communications establishing that the naval officers were spying on the submarine programme, the officer further said. The purported evidence, he added, has not been shared with India.

Former naval commander Purnendu Tiwari — who was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman in 2019 for his services to India — has been incarcerated since September last year along with fellow officers Navtej Singh Gill, Birendra Kumar Verma, Sugunakar Pakala, Sanjeev Gupta, Amit Nagpal, Saurab Vasisht and Ragesh Gopakumar. The men were contracted to provide training services to the Qatar navy.

At least one of the former officers had experience of submarine projects, public records show. Sugunakar worked as additional general manager in charge of submarine repairs at Hindustan Shipyard in Visakhapatnam from 2016 to 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Tiwari worked as managing director at defence consultant Dahra Global Technologies & Consulting Services. Former Oman air force officer Khamis al-Ajmi, the chief executive officer of Dahra Global, was briefly detained after the arrests, but was released…..

To read more: https://theprint.in/defence/8-former-navy-officers-imprisoned-by-qatar-accused-of-spying-on-emirates-super-secret-submarine-programme/1525711/