Chief Justice of India NV Ramana on Monday asked journalist Mohammed Zubair to plead before the bench headed by Justice DY Chandrachud in his petition seeking to quash multiple cases registered against him.
“There is a slew of FIRs against him. As soon as he gets bail in one case, he is arrested in another. As we speak he is arrested again,” Mohd Zubair’s lawyer Vrinda Grover told the CJI.
The CJI said, “I’m listing the matter before Justice Chandrachud.”
AltNews co-founder Mohammed Zubair had moved the Supreme Court seeking to quash all six FIRs filed against him by the Uttar Pradesh police over his ‘controversial’ tweets. The six cases were registered against him in five districts of UP– Muzaffarnagar, Ghaziabad, Sitapur, Lakhimpur and Hathras.
In his plea before the top court, Zubair had also challenged the constitution of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) by the UP government to probe the pending cases against him. He had requested the Apex court to combine the cases together with the one registered in Delhi, in which he was first arrested. Zubair has sought interim bail in all the six FIRs.
The Delhi Police arrested Mohammed Zubair on June 27 for allegedly hurting religious sentiments through one of his tweets which contains a screenshot from 1983 Bollywood movie and was sent to one-day police custody by the trial court on the same day.
A Delhi court granted him bail in that case on Friday.
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Rabia Shireen is a Staff Reporter at The Cognate.
