Income Tax Department sleuths survey BBC's Mumbai studios, Delhi office

A team of Income Tax Department sleuths carried out a 'survey' at the global media conglomerate BBC's Mumbai studios and office in Delhi on Tuesday.

The BBC studio is situated in a commercial hub near the Bandra Kurla Complex in central Mumbai where offices of several national and multinational companies are also located.

The sleuths are understood to have seized the mobiles, laptops, tablets of the staffers present there, though exact details of the investigations by the central probe agency were not available.

A large number of media persons and photographers, besides many curious onlookers out for the lunch break, converged outside the studio building awaiting the nitty-gritties of the ITD operation inside the BBC studio.

Though no insiders were available for comments, the survey of the Mumbai studio is connected with an ongoing similar operation at the BBC offices in New Delhi, which sparked off a major political furore.

The Income Tax department officials reached the British Broadcasting Service (BBC) office in Delhi's Kasturba Gandhi Marg, said the sources.

The sources also said that the team reached there to verify documents and some of the employees were also asked to leave the office and go home.

"Phones have also been seized," said the sources.

Though the reasons behind the ITD's survey' or what the sleuths were looking for are not clear, it is widely suspected to be a fallout of the recent documentary 'India: The Modi Question' on the 2002 Gujarat riots aired by BBC that rankled the Indian government.

--IANS

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