Andhra police arrest a naval base staffer and a driver in a Visakhapatnam spy case

Andhra Pradesh Police on Tuesday said they had arrested two men linked to the naval base at Visakhapatnam, alleging they passed defence information to Pakistan intelligence operatives. The Counter Intelligence Cell is calling the inquiry Operation Firewall–2026, opened on 1 October. Police say the module has 18 suspects, of whom 13 are naval personnel. Two are in custody. The other 16 are not, in the account the Indian Express published on Tuesday evening.

The first man named is Pradeep Mukharjee, an employee of the Visakhapatnam base. Police said he was arrested in Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu. They allege he shared a one-time password so that a Pakistan intelligence operative could activate a WhatsApp account, stayed in contact, and passed information about naval and defence establishments. He was produced before a court in Vijayawada on Tuesday and remanded to judicial custody until 14 October. The remand is not a charge sheet. It holds him while investigators write one.

The second man is Annam Sai Varaprasad, a civilian contract driver engaged for naval officers at Visakhapatnam. Police allege he shared sensitive information with a Pakistan intelligence operative for money. They have not published the sum, the dates of the payments, or the list of what he is said to have passed. A driver on a naval base is not a cleared analyst. The allegation, if it holds, is that access to officers' movements and conversations was enough to be worth paying for.

The 13 naval personnel inside the suspect list of 18 are the figure that changes the scale. Two arrests, one of them a civilian driver and one a base employee picked up in another state, are a case. Thirteen serving or employed naval names, still mostly unarrested in the public account, are a module. Police have not said how many of the 13 are sailors, how many are civilian staff, or how many have been questioned without arrest. The Eastern Naval Command is headquartered at Visakhapatnam. A suspect list that large, attached to that base, will be read in Delhi as a clearance problem as much as a criminal one.

Operation Firewall–2026 started on 1 October. The arrests became public on 6 October. That is a five-day window from the opening of the cell's operation to the first remand. Mukharjee's arrest in Coimbatore, rather than on the base, is the detail that suggests he had left Visakhapatnam before the cell closed on him. The Express did not say when he travelled, or whether the base had already suspended him. Those dates matter for whether the information flow had already stopped.

WhatsApp is the channel named for Mukharjee: an OTP for an account a foreign operative would then control. That is a specific allegation, and it is different from a stolen document or a photographed notice board. An OTP hands over an account. What was then said on it is the part the remand will be used to extract from phones. Varaprasad's alleged channel is described only as sharing information for money. The two methods, if both are proved, are not the same offence in practice. One is account handover. The other is paid reporting.

The Navy has not, in the reports available on Tuesday evening, published its own statement on how many of its people are under inquiry, or whether any ship movement was altered because of what police say was passed. The public record is the police account: Operation Firewall from 1 October, 18 suspects, 13 from the Navy, Mukharjee remanded until 14 October, Varaprasad arrested as a contract driver. The open question is how many of the remaining 16 are questioned before that remand ends.