Cong IT workers’ transfer to Rajasthan prima facie illegal police custody: MPHC

Bhopal/Jabalpur: The Madhya Pradesh high court on Tuesday said the arrest of three Congress IT cell workers, and their transfer to Rajasthan prima facie appears to be a case of illegal police custody. It directed the Bhopal police commissioner to treat their statements as complaints and initiate action.

A division bench of chief justice Sanjeev Sachdeva and justice Vinay Saraf said copies of the workers’ statements, recorded before a judicial magistrate in Jabalpur on the court’s direction, must be sent to the Bhopal police commissioner.

The commissioner has been asked to treat these as formal complaints, initiate action under the law within three months, and submit a report to the court. The court fixed June 18 for the next date of hearing.

The case stems from Rajasthan police taking three Congress IT cell workers -- Nikhil, Bilal and Inam -- to Rajasthan with assistance from Bhopal police last month, alleging they had uploaded a fake letter purportedly issued by former Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje Scindia on the Women’s Reservation Bill.

One Khizer Khan moved a habeas corpus petition in the high court, alleging the trio had been held in illegal custody and taken out of the state without a transit remand.

In the previous hearing of the case, they were produced in the court by Rajasthan police. The sequence of events narrated by police from their arrest to their journey to Rajasthan was vastly different from what the Congress IT workers and the petitioner told the court, making the judges to ask CJM, Jabalpur to depute a judicial magistrate to record statements of the three Congress workers. Rajasthan police told the court that the three Congress workers were neither arrested nor detained, police only accompanied them to Rajasthan.

During the hearing of the case on Tuesday, Bhopal crime branch Bhopal sub-inspector Pramod Kumar Sharma, Rajasthan ACP Balram Chaudhary and some other police personnel from Rajasthan appeared in the high court.