10 months after arrest of accused in Morbi land scam, Gujarat high court holds it illegal

Ahmedabad: Nearly 10 months after the arrest of an accused in connection with a land-grab scam in Morbi, the Gujarat high court has held his arrest illegal and ordered him to be set free immediately.

The case involves Sagar Fultaria, who was arrested in July 2025 by the Morbi police on charges of land grabbing and forgery. Earlier, the high court rejected Fultaria’s anticipatory bail application considering the gravity of the offence. After his arrest, the courts denied him regular bail.

Fultaria’s father, Ambaram, filed a habeas corpus petition in the HC earlier this year, claiming that the police did not follow due procedure while detaining and arresting his son. Fultaria was illegally detained on July 25, 2025, from Gurugram and brought here before his ‘paper arrest’, as shown in Morbi on July 28, 2025, alleged the father. Moreover, the procedure of conveying to him the grounds for arrest was also not followed, he further stated.

The state govt tried to defend the investigator’s action. But the bench of Justice Sangeeta Vishen and Justice D M Vyas found that Fultaria’s personal liberty was curtailed from the moment his movement was restrained by police, and not from the later “paper arrest” time recorded by the investigating agency. The HC held that Fultaria’s factual custody began on July 25, 2025.

The HC held that the constitutional and statutory requirement to produce an arrested person before the nearest magistrate within 24 hours was breached. The court rejected the govt’s attempt to characterise the period between July 25 and July 27, 2025, as “voluntary accompaniment” for a preliminary inquiry and noted that the petitioner was already named as an accused in the FIR.

The HC further held that the police failed to obtain transit remand after arresting the petitioner outside Gujarat, citing Supreme Court guidance that transit remand is obligatory to lawfully move an arrested person across jurisdictions for production before the competent court.

Besides, the HC also found non-compliance with Article 22(1) because the “grounds of arrest” were not meaningfully communicated to Fultaria or his relatives. “In the case on hand, there is not a whisper or semblance of any material produced through which it can be said that the petitioner was informed orally, much less in writing, about the grounds of his arrest… Therefore, on this count as well, the arrest of the petitioner stands vitiated and the petitioner deserves to be set free,” the court said.

While ordering Fultaria’s release, the HC asked the trial court to impose suitable release conditions.