HC seeks Delhi Police's response on Zubair challenging further custody

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Sunday directed the Delhi Police to file a response to a plea moved by AltNews cofounder Mohammed Zubair against a lower court's order, allowing police to keep him in custody along seizing and examining his laptop. The lower court order was on the 2018 objectionable tweet case, IANS reported.

In his plea, Zubair had sought restoration of his laptop or documents seized by the police.

The single bench of Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav granted the Police four weeks to respond and granted the petitioner liberty to fill rejoinder and additional documents in response.

On July 1, a vocation of Justice Sanjeev Narula directed the police to file a counter-affidavit within two weeks when the bench was dealing with the plea.

In the last hearing, Zubair's advocate Vrinda Grover argued that police arrested her client, breaching the Arnesh Kumar guidelines issued by the Supreme Court. Regarding police seizing his laptop and mobile phone, she said it was an attempt to breach his journalistic freedom.

Last week, the top court granted Zubair bail in all the six FIRs filed against him in Uttar Pradesh's various districts over the tweets and clubbed all of them with the Delhi FIR.

The court also allowed him to move the Delhi High Court to quash the cases. It added that its directions would apply to future cases registered based on tweets that were part of previous FIRs.

In June, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Patiala House Courts, Snigdha Sarvaria, allowed the custody of the fact-checker in connection with one of his tweets on the micro-blogging platform Twitter in 2018 in which he allegedly hurt the religious sentiments of a community.

The Special Cell of Delhi Police flew Zubair to Bengaluru to recover his laptop, which he used for uploading various contents on social media sites. He was charged under the Indian Penal Code's Sections 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on the grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence) and 295A (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs) for one of his allegedly objectionable tweets.

The Delhi Police's FIR read, "Transmission and publication of such posts have been deliberately done by Mohammed Zubair through electronic media to insult the religious feelings of a particular community with the intent to provoke breach of peace."

According to the FIR, Zubair had used a screengrab of an old Hindi movie which showed an image of a hotel, with its board reading 'Hanuman hotel' instead of 'Honeymoon hotel'. In his tweet, Zubair had written, "BEFORE 2014: Honeymoon Hotel. After 2014: Hanuman Hotel".