Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair told the Delhi High Court on Monday that the police had falsely attributed a disclosure statement to him to raid his home and seize his devices in a case pertaining to a tweet that he had posted in March 2018 , Live Law reported.
The tweet contained a still from a 1983 Hindi movie of a signboard being repainted from “Honeymoon Hotel” to “Hanuman Hotel”. An anonymous Twitter user with the handle @balajikijaiin alleged that the tweet hurt Hindu sentiments.
On June 27, the journalist was arrested by a cyber unit of the Delhi Police on charges of hurting religious sentiments. On July 15, a Delhi court granted him bail, saying that “free speech is the proper foundation of a democratic society”.
In response to a status report on the case filed by the Delhi Police in September, Zubair said on Monday that he had not made any disclosure statement to the investigating officer or any other police official while in custody or at any time during the inquiry.
Any such disclosure is “wholly false, wrong, concocted and inadmissible in law”, he told the High Court.
Earlier, the police had claimed that Zubair had told them that the laptop and mobile phone used by him for posting the 2018 tweet was at his home in Bengaluru.
However, the fact-checker said on Monday that he had “clearly and specifically” told the police that he had lost the mobile phone that he had used to post the tweet.
He argued that the actions of the investigating officer in creating false disclosure statements is “a subversion of the rule of law and makes a mockery of due process”.
“Further, the tweet in question clearly states that it was posted from an Android device [mobile phone], so it has no connection to any laptop,” Zubair said. “The said search and seizure from my residence was thus carried out with malafide reasons extraneous to the need for investigation.”
The journalist also refuted the Delhi Police allegations that he posted content that hurts religious sentiments to gain popularity.
“I am a fact-checker and I post content on social media debunking fake news, misinformation and disinformation of all kinds, and my work is not limited to any particular kind of posts, nor do I post content for popularity or any other material gain,” he stated.
Cases have also been filed against Zubair in the Uttar Pradesh districts of Sitapur, Lakhimpur Kheri, Muzaffarnagar and Ghaziabad and two in Hathras. They are related to satirical comments about television news anchors, allegedly hurting religious sentiments of the Hindu community and posting alleged inflammatory content about deities.
He walked out of Tihar Jail after 23 days on July 20 after the Supreme Court granted him interim bail in the six cases in Uttar Pradesh.
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