Bengaluru: SK Sharma, one of the six men wrongly accused in the ISRO spy case, passed away in the early hours of Thursday. The 62-year-old was suffering from stage-4 oesophagus cancer and had spent the last 12 days in a hospital.
A labour contractor based in Bengaluru, Sharma was arrested by the Kerala police 24 years ago following the arrest of his friend and scientist K Chandrasekhar.
Chandrasekhar was wrongly accused of selling Indian-made rocket designs to Pakistan and Sharma was charged by Kerala police and Intelligence Bureau (IB) as a party to the case.
The Supreme Court acquitted Sharma in 1998 with a compensation of Rs 1 lakh. His case of defamation against the Kerala government and state police has still not come to a conclusion.
Sharma was 34 when he was first illegally detained for two days in 1994 from a DRDO lab in Bengaluru. Within a span of days, I went from a contractor to a traitor, he had told Times of India in an interview after the Supreme Court ordered Kerala government to pay a compensation of Rs 50 lakh to scientist Nambi Narayanan for falsely accusing him.
The SC verdict had given him hope that his case too would come to a conclusion and help him clear his name. He said he wanted all to see that he was a simple man, and not a traitor.
He was also counting on a favourable verdict to pay for his cancer treatment and pay off the loans he had accrued over the last two decades of being falsely labelled a traitor and an anti-national. As a contractor, he was earning around Rs 50 lakh per annum in 1994 but the false case had ruined his reputation and business.
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