The family of Vernon Gonsalves, one of the five activists arrested for alleged Maoist links, rejected Saturday the police charges against him and termed them "fabricated" and diversionary.
The police claimed to have "conclusive proof", including letters seized during the raids, to link the arrested Left-wing activists to Maoists.
"I was present when searches and raids were conducted at our home and I know what the police have seized," said Sagar Gonsalves.
He said the police were talking in the air when they made the allegations at their press conference on Friday.
"I could not stop laughing when the police were levelling false charges with the so called letters," he said.
The activist's wife Susan Abraham, who is a lawyer, called the police action a ploy to divert attention from the real culprits behind the Koregaon-Bhima violence that took place on January 1.
"The letters read out by the police during the media briefing are manufactured. None of these letters were filed or submitted to the court," she said on Saturday.
She accused the police of not following the set procedure for carrying out such probes.
"The police have not followed the procedure established by the cyber laws for seizure of electronic data, she said.
The police have planted these fabricated letters because none (of them have been) filed in court and this is against GRs (government resolutions) and the Bombay High Court judgment prohibiting leaking information to media during investigation," she said.
Revealing evidence in a case is against the basic principles of criminal investigation and violates the rights of an accused, she said.
"This all is being done to divert attention from the real culprits behind the Koregaon-Bhima violence which is the Bhide-Ekbote gang," Abraham added.
Milind Ekbote of Samast Hindu Aghadi and Sambhaji Bhide, the founder of Shiv Pratishthan Hindustan, are accused of orchestrating the violence. But both have denied these allegations.
Abraham said that "imaginary assassination plots" were being "invented" to divert attention from the killings of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, MM Kalburgi and journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh.
She claimed it was being done to deflect from demands being made to ban the right-wing Sanatan Sanstha, which has been accused of having links with people arrested in connection with these killings as well as the seizure of explosives by the Maharashtra anti-terror squad.
Besides Vernon Gonsalves, the other arrested are Varavara Rao (Hyderabad), Arun Ferreira (Mumbai), Sudha Bharadwaj (Faridabad) and Gautam Navalakha (New Delhi).
The Supreme Court has ordered that the five be kept under house arrest till September 6.
The raids were carried out as part of a probe into the "Elgaar Parishad", an event organised in Pune on December 31, 2017, which allegedly triggered violence at Koregaon-Bhima village in Pune district the next day.
Addressing a press conference here on Friday, Additional Director General (Law and Order) Param Bir Singh said an email exchanged between activist Rona Wilson and a Maoist leader, spoke of ending "Modi-raj" with a 'Rajiv Gandhi-type incident'.
Wilson was arrested in Delhi in June in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima violence in Maharashtra in January.
Besides Wilson, other activists-lawyers were arrested in June by the Pune Police are Sudhir Dhawale (from Mumbai), Surendra Gadling, Shoma Sen and Mahesh Raut (all from Nagpur).
All the activists arrested in June and early this week had links with Maoists, Singh had said.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)