The Andhra Pradesh police has arrested six executives of Tata Indicom in connection with a criminal complaint filed by Reliance Infocomm against them.

Additional Director-General of Police M L Kumawat said the Tata Indicom officials were arrested on Tuesday after a criminal case (No.20/2003) was registered against their company under sections 420, 409 and 120-B of the Indian Penal Code, section 65 of the Information Technology Act, and section 63 of the Copyrights Act.

They were charged with wooing Reliance Infocomm customers with certain tariff plans, tampering with Reliance handsets and getting their sets activated to the network by hacking the ESN number of the world class-third generation digital handset, which was a proprietary property of Reliance Infocomm.

The arrested executives were identified as Sadagopachar Rajanarain, Shaik Mustafa, Gopi Manoj Kumar, Patalay Naveen Kumar, Khaja Gareebun Nawaz and Syed Asifuddin. They were produced before the court for judicial remand.

Reliance Infocomm has modified its scheme shortly after launch. The present scheme 'POB1' offers subscribers a digital handset worth Rs 10,500 for just Rs 3,350 with a service bundle for a period of three years at a monthly rental of Rs 600.

However, Reliance Infocomm noticed that some staffers of the rival company were luring its customers with cheaper tariff plans and getting activated to its network. Thereafter, Reliance officials lodged a complaint with the police.

In all, Tata Indicom officials allegedly activated 63 Reliance handsets and provided Tata Mobitel connections.

In a statement, Tata Teleservices Limited maintained that its actions were within the normal legal framework. "Since the matter is now subjudice, we refrain from commenting on specifics of the case," it said.