Ashish Mishra, the prime accused in the Lakhimpur Kheri violence case and the son of Union minister Ajay Mishra, on Sunday surrendered at court in Uttar Pradesh, PTI reported.
On April 18, the Supreme Court had cancelled the bail granted by the Allahabad High Court to Ashish Mishra. A three-judge bench of Chief Justice NV Ramana and Justices Surya Kant and Hima Kohli had directed him to surrender within a week.
Authorities have sent him back to the Lakhimpur prison, NDTV reported. Jail Superintendent PP Singh said Mishra will be kept in a separate barrack because of security concerns, according to PTI.
Farmer bodies had alleged that a vehicle belonging to Ashish Mishra had run over demonstrators during a protest against the now-repealed three farm laws in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district on October 3. Eight people, including four farmers and a journalist, had died.
Mishra had been arrested on October 9. He walked out of jail on February 15, five days after the High Court’s bail order.
Families of those killed had challenged the bail order in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court order
In its order last week, the Supreme Court had said that the Allahabad High Court granted bail to Mishra by taking into account irrelevant considerations. The High Court also denied families of farmers killed in the violence a chance to participate in the bail proceedings, the judges said.
“The denial of victims to be heard and the tearing hurry shown by the High Court merits the setting aside of bail order,” the order added. “Thus, we remand the matter back to High Court for fresh consideration of the bail application of [the] accused [person].”
The Supreme Court said that the Allahabad High Court could consider Mishra’s bail plea in an impartial and impassionate manner.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling, senior advocate Dushyant Dave, representing the petitioners, had urged the judges to assign another bench to hear the case. However, the Supreme Court left the matter to the chief justice of the Allahabad High Court.
Justice Rajeev Singh of the Allahabad High Court, while granting bail to Mishra on February 10, had observed that no firearm injuries were found either on the body of any of the deceased persons or on the body of those injured in the violence. The first information report in the case accused Mishra of shooting dead one of the farmers. Though the post-mortem report did not show any bullet injury.
The Supreme Court, however, said that the judge had treated the FIR as an “encyclopaedia of the events” and therefore, the bail order could not be sustained.
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