New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday extended interim bail granted to Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair in the Sitapur case until further orders, Live Law reported.
Zubair has been booked in Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur for calling three Hindutva supremacists hatemongers in a tweet. All three of the seers mentioned by Zubair – Yati Narasinghanand Saraswati, Bajrang Muni and Anand Swaroop – have been booked in hate speech cases in the past few months for making inflammatory statements about Muslims.
On July 8, the Supreme Court had granted the 39-year-old journalist interim bail for five days. However, he remains in custody as he has also been named in several other cases.
At Tuesday’s hearing, a Supreme Court bench headed by Justice DY Chandrachud gave four weeks to the Uttar Pradesh government to file an affidavit stating its stand in the case. The bench listed the case on September 7 for final disposal.
Earlier in the day, Zubair’s lawyer Vrinda Grover told a Delhi court that the Supreme Court’s directives reiterating that granting of bail must be the rule in criminal cases should be enforced by the law of the land, Bar and Bench reported.
The Delhi Police had arrested Zubair on June 27 for a tweet that he had posted in March 2018.
rover on Tuesday referred to a judgement by the Supreme Court in a separate case on Monday that asked the Union government to consider enacting a “Bail Act” to streamline the granting of bail. The Supreme Court had noted that jails in the country are “flooded with undertrial prisoners” and said that the problem had been caused mainly due to unnecessary arrests, according to Live Law. Scroll. In
