The allahabad High court on friday stayed the arrest of Alt news co-founder Mohammad Zubair till january 6, 2025 in connection with an FIR lodged at a ghaziabad police station last month. A case has been registered against Zubair on the complaint of controversial Mahant Yeti Narasimhanand's associate Udita Tyagi for promoting enmity between religious groups and several other charges. The order to stay Zubair's arrest was passed by a bench of Justice siddhartha Verma and Justice Nalin Kumar Srivastava.
The complaint filed by Udita Tyagi, general secretary of Yeti Narasimhanand Saraswati Trust, claimed that Zubair posted a video clip of an old program of Narasimhanand on october 3, 2024 with the intention of inciting violence among the Muslim community against Yeti Narasimhanand. The court said, in our opinion, by reading the FIR, one can assume that a crime is being made out to a large extent under Section 196 of the indian Justice Code (BNS). However, whether any crime is made out under Section 152 of the BNS in the FIR needs to be considered.
The court gave three weeks' time
The court said, "The exchange of affidavits is yet to be done between the concerned parties. The argument of the Additional Advocate General regarding separatist activity is also pending, so we think it would be appropriate to give three weeks' time to the state government to file a detailed affidavit." The court also took note of the criminal history of the petitioner and the order of the supreme court in the writ petition (crime no. 279) of 2022 (Mohammad Zubair vs government of Delhi), in which the petitioner was granted bail in several criminal cases. The bench said, "We are of the view that the petitioner should not be arrested till the next date." The court said, "He (Zubair) will cooperate in the investigation and since his lawyer has given an affidavit that he will not go out of the country, he should submit his passport to the police Commissioner in Ghaziabad." It is noteworthy that in the FIR lodged in ghaziabad, it has also been alleged that Zubair posted an edited clip of Narsinghanand on 'X' which included Narsinghanand's alleged inflammatory comments about Prophet Mohammad. The alleged purpose of this post was to incite violent sentiments against Narsinghanand. In this post, Zubair had described Narsinghanand's alleged speech as "insulting".
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