Hyderabad: The city police have asked the CBI to issue a Red Corner Notice against former Telangana Special Intelligence chief T. Prabhakar Rao, who is one of the main accused in the phone tapping case.

On March 13, Hyderabad Police arrested the suspended DSP of the Special Intelligence Bureau (SIB), two other SPs and a former Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) on charges of deleting intelligence information from electronic devices and intercepting telephone conversations during the previous tenure of the BRS.

Rao and another accused, a journalist, are absconding and suspected of being in the US. Hyderabad Police Commissioner Kothakotta Sreenivas Reddy said on Saturday that he had recently met the CBI director and asked for the Red Corner Notice.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is Interpol’s nodal agency in India and requests for global alerts must be routed through this agency.

“The case will be pursued once the main culprits are arrested and they are now on the run. We have also written to the US Consul General that they (the accused) are misusing the other country’s visas. We are confident that in the next few days we will…” the Hyderabad police chief told reporters. He said it (Red Corner Notice) was under process and “we want to expedite it.”

When asked whether the police were considering sending communications to policymakers as part of their investigation into the case, the commissioner replied: “Definitely, as the case progresses.”

Prabhakar Rao was accused of forming a ‘Special Operations Team’ under the suspended DSP within the SIB to carry out certain tasks related to political surveillance that would benefit the then ruling BRS and its leaders.

The retired police officer, who is in the US for “medical treatment”, recently denied the allegations against him and called them “wild and false”.

The suspended DSP and his team created profiles of hundreds of people and intercepted telephone conversations of several people, police said.

The arrested and others are accused of creating profiles of several people without permission, secretly and illegally monitoring them in the SIB, using these profiles in a partisan manner for the benefit of a political party on behalf of some people, and conspiring to destroy the records to make evidence of their crimes disappear, police said earlier.