A court in Delhi has ordered two former court masters accused of tampering a Supreme Court order to be sent to seven days in police custody, Bar and Bench reported on Monday. The Court of Metropolitan Magistrate at Patiala House said Manav Sharma and Tapan Kumar Chakraborty will be produced in court on April 15.

The court said the “offence alleged is serious in nature”.

The two are accused of tampering with the Supreme Court’s order in Ericsson’s contempt plea against industrialist Anil Ambani dated January 7, 2019.

The police told Metropolitan Magistrate Sumeet Anand that they needed them in custody to find out more about other people involved in the alleged tampering. The accused’s counsel told the court that they had been “falsely implicated and wrongly arrested” in the case and that they were cooperating with the investigation.

The accused said that their job profiles did not give them access to tamper with the record nor was it their duty to upload the Supreme Court’s orders on the website. The orders are uploaded only after the “requisite procedure of checking the orders is conducted by persons concerned”, the accused said.