The authorities in Narendra Modi-rule India have raided offices of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Delhi and Mumbai weeks after the broadcaster aired a documentary about the 2002 Muslim genocide in the Indian state of Gujarat. Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat back then.

The raids were carried out by the Income Tax Department, Indian media outlets reported.

BBC issued a terse statement saying that it was cooperating with the tax authorities.

“The Income Tax Authorities are currently at the BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai and we are fully cooperating,” it said adding “we hope to have this situation resolved as soon as possible.”

In the Delhi office of the BBC, located in Kasturba Gandhi Marg, officials seized the phones of employees and asked them to leave the offices and go home early, reported Business Today.

The BBC premises in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) area were under “inspection”.

India Today, citing sources, said that the searches at the BBC offices were related to allegations of International Taxation and Transfer Pricing irregularities.

In Delhi, two people looking after the Urdu services, along with the finance department officials were inside the office premises, according to India Today.

The BBC has two offices in Mumbai – one at the Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) and another one at Khar – and the tax officials were present at the BKC office premises, while the employees at the BBC’s Khar office were asked to go home, it said.

Journalist Aditya Raj Kaul tweeted a video taken outside a multistorey building in Delhi “as the Income Tax raid/survey” continued.

The opposition Indian National Congress questioned the raids but stopped short of condemning it.

“First came the BBC documentary, it was banned. Now IT has raided BBC. undeclared emergency,” it said in a tweet.

Congress MP Jairam_Ramesh said that at a moment when the opposition was asking questions about the Adani Group, the government was going after the BBC.

India’s Adani Group has been accused of fraud by research firm Hindenburg and Modi has come under fire for his close relationship with Adani.

Last month, the broadcaster aired a two-part documentary alleging that Modi ordered police to turn a blind eye to sectarian riots in Gujarat state, where he was premier at the time.

The violence left at least 1,000 people dead, most of them minority Muslims. India’s government blocked videos and tweets sharing links to the documentary using emergency powers under its information technology laws.

Government adviser Kanchan Gupta had slammed the documentary as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage”.

University student groups later organised viewings of the documentary despite campus bans, defying government efforts to stop its spread. Police arrested two dozen students at the prestigious Delhi University after stopping a screening there.

‘Campaign of violence’

The 2002 riots in Gujarat began after 59 Hindu pilgrims were killed in a fire on a train. Thirty-one Muslims were convicted of criminal conspiracy and murder over that incident.

The BBC documentary cited a previously classified British foreign ministry report quoting unnamed sources saying that Modi met senior police officers and “ordered them not to intervene” in the anti-Muslim violence by right-wing Hindu groups that followed.

The violence was “politically motivated” and the aim “was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas”, the foreign ministry report said.

The “systematic campaign of violence has all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing” and was impossible “without the climate of impunity created by the state Government… Narendra Modi is directly responsible”, it concluded.

Modi, who ran Gujarat from 2001 until his election as prime minister in 2014, was briefly subject to a travel ban by the United States over the violence.

A special investigative team appointed by India’s Supreme Court to probe the roles of Modi and others in the violence said in 2012 it did not find any evidence to prosecute the then chief minister.