The Delhi unit of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is set to fly into Sri Lanka and Maldives to take statements from Mariyam Rasheedha and Fauziyya Hassan, who were among the then arrested in the ISRO Spy Case.

The ISRO spy case surfaced in 1994 when S. Nambi Narayanan, then a top scientist at the ISRO unit here was arrested on charges of espionage along with another senior ISRO official, two Maldivian women - Fauziyya Hassan and Mariam Rasheeda and a businessman.

Fauziyya is presently settled in Colombo, while Rasheeda is in Maldives. Fauziyya told the media that a team of CBI officials had informed her that first they will meet Rasheeda and then come to take a statement from her.

“But following lockdown norms in Colombo, their visit, which was planned for last month, did not take place and they cancelled the Maldives trip also,” She said.

According to sources in the know of things, the team of Delhi CBI officials is shortly expected to meet the two women. Since Fauziyya's health is bad, she expressed her inability to travel to India and therefore, the CBI decided to meet her at her place, sources said.

It was last month that the CBI registered an FIR at the Thiruvananthapuram Chief Judicial Magistrate’s Court against 18 people, all of whom had probed the case and included top former Kerala Police and IB officials, who have been charged with conspiracy and fabrication of documents.

Things changed for Narayanan when the Supreme Court in 2020 appointed a three-member committee headed by retired judge Justice D.K. Jain to probe if there was a conspiracy among the then police officials to falsely implicate Narayanan.

The new CBI team arrived in August and to work on the orders of the apex court.

The CBI freed Narayanan in 1995 and since then he has been fighting a legal battle against Mathews, S. Vijayan and Joshua who probed the case and falsely implicated him.

Narayanan has now received a compensation of INR 19 million from various agencies, including the Kerala government, which in 2020 paid him INR 13 million and later awarded INR 5 million as directed by the Supreme Court in 2018 and another INR 1 million ordered by the National Human Rights Commission.

The compensation was because the former ISRO scientist had to suffer wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecution and humiliation.