The Rajasthan High Court on Thursday granted bail to one of the men accused in the 2022 killing of a tailor in Udaipur, The Indian Express reported.
A bench of Justices Pankaj Bhandari and Praveer Bhatnagar granted bail to Mohammad Javed, who was accused of conducting a recce for the two main accused persons – Mohammad Riyaz and Ghouse Mohammad.
On June 28, 2022, Riyaz and Mohammad killed the tailor, Kanhaiya Lal, for purportedly sharing a social media post in support of former Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Nupur Sharma. The two men had posted a video of the killing online and were arrested hours later.
Sharma had made disparaging remarks about Prophet Muhammad during a television debate a month before, which led to a spate of violence and unrest across several parts of the country. There was also a diplomatic outrage from some Gulf countries.
The Rajasthan Police had filed the initial case after Lal’s killing. However, the National Investigation Agency subsequently took over the matter and registered a separate case on June 29, 2022.
On Thursday, lawyer Syed Saadat Ali, representing Javed, said that he had filed an appeal on the grounds that he had been arrested merely on the basis of call details.
“He has been in jail since July 21, 2022 and the only thing against him were the call details,” Ali said, according to The Indian Express. “But the NIA [National Investigation Agency] could not even prove the location in the call details or that all three of them conspired.”
He said that the investigative agency could not point to the location where all three men allegedly sat and conspired to kill Lal. “On this ground, the honourable High Court released Mohammad Javed on a bail of Rs 2 lakh,” Ali said.
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