HYDERABAD: The accused in the Satyam scam on Wednesday appealed before the court for permission to use computers in prison to prepare their defence. Additional chief metropolitan magistrate B V L N Chakravarthy posted the case to June 25 for a decision.

Though it was G Ramakrishna, the former vice president, finance, of the erstwhile Satyam Computers, who is seeking the computer facility, it was K Ravinder Reddy, the counsel for B Ramalinga Raju and Rama Raju (Raju brothers, the prime accused in the scam) who told the court on Wednesday that there was nothing wrong in extending the facility to the undertrials when the state itself was setting up BPOs in jails like Charlapally. The counsel was referring to a report published by TOI about the Charlapally prison setting up a BPO centre manned by prisoners on its premises.

He said as many as 200 prisoners are being trained to operate this BPO in Charlapally and added that it would be unfair to say that providing computers in the jail is not feasible.

He was referring to the report submitted by Chanchalguda jail superintendent who, upon being asked about such feasibility, said it may be difficult for them to meet such demands if all the prisoners join the bandwagon and demand similar facilities.

The magistrate, who heard the rival contentions on the issue of clubbing the cases in this scam, posted it to June 23 for delivering his verdict on this issue exclusively.

The CBI had filed three charge sheets in the scam so far. The first two pertained to the main scam and the last one relates to the income tax irregularities. CBI wanted the first two to be treated as one case and the charge sheet on I-T case to be treated as a one. But the accused sought the clubbing of all the three cases into one case.

The court will also hear on June 23 the case pertaining to examining Ramalinga Raju via video link from Nims Hospital.