Praveen Mahajan at a Mumbai court on Monday. (PTI)

Mumbai, Nov. 12: A sessions court today said the defence, while demonstrating how a text message could be tampered with, must use the same cellphone model as the one used by Pramod Mahajan before he was shot last year.

Additional sessions judge S.P. Daware directed that if such a handset was unavailable, defence witness P. Harikrishnan could use Pramod’s phone, which is in the court’s custody.

The BJP leader’s family has alleged that his youngest brother Praveen, the prime accused in the case, had sent “veiled threats” to Pramod on his cellphone.

Praveen’s lawyers argued that the text messages had been fabricated. They presented Harikrishnan, a software engineer from Pune, as a witness, who told the court that using Microsoft software, the contents, date and time of a text message could be altered without the knowledge of the receiver.

The court had directed Harikrishnan to demonstrate it in court today.

But when he arrived with a laptop and a Motorola Razr V3, special public prosecutor Niteen Pradhan pointed out that it was an upgraded version of Pramod’s phone.

“We are not here to get a diploma or degree in fabricating an SMS. But we have to go by rules and the entire examination has to be confined to facts,” Pradhan said.

Harikrishnan indicated that if the original was used, the demonstration could cause “five per cent” irreparable damage to it.

But the court told the defence that Pramod’s phone would have to be used if there was no alternative. Pramod’s widow Rekha, sister Pradnya Munde and brother-in-law Gopinath Munde have told the court that Praveen had sent the threat messages on April 15, a week before shooting him at his Worli home.

The message read: “Ab na hogi prarthana, ab na hogi yachana, ab hoga ran, ya hogi jeet, ya hoga maran (No more prayers or request. Now there will be war. There will be either victory or death),”

The court today adjourned the case to November 16.

The directive is being viewed with interest in legal circles. If the defence succeeds in proving that an SMS can be tampered with, it can be used in other cases where text messages have been cited as evidence.

In the Rizwanur Rahman case, for instance, the CBI is investigating text messages allegedly sent by the computer graphics teacher hinting that he was planning to commit suicide.