Former Indian Navy officers are facing charges of spying on Qatar's secret submarine program in the service of Israel, Indian media reported on Thursday.
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The eight men were arrested last August, and proceedings against them began late in March. They will be in court for their next hearing in May.
According to a report in The Print, an Indian news site, Qatari officials suspect that the men had been gathering intelligence at a factory in Bergamo in Italy, on " Italian-made, high-tech submarines coated with metamaterials that make their detection by adversaries difficult."
The submarines are smaller variants of the U212 Near Future Submarine, built by Italy in cooperation with the German Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, the report said.
Qatar's intelligence services claimed that they had intercepted electronic communications that confirmed their accusations adding that the information was not shared with the Indian government. India rejects the allegations against its citizens.
The news site quoted an Indian intelligence source who said that Indian officials tried hard to convince the Qataris that the men were not involved in spying against the Gulf state but Doha insisted that information they gathered was passed on to Israel.