A Budgam court on Wednesday granted bail to Kashmiri separatist leader Masarat Alam Bhat, and slammed the state police for his “extra-judicial detention”, reported The Indian Express. “So long as this part of the country is part of the Indian union, to which this court has no doubt, situations like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay cannot be tolerated, at least in cases raised in the courts… ,” the court said.

Questioning the police's plea for repeated detention of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leader, the court observed that the law of the country cannot allow such extra-judicial custody. Chief Judicial Magistrate Budgam Masarat Roohi came down heavily on the police for seeking Alam's detention time and again.

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“If such a trend is sanctioned by the courts of law… (considering) the might of the state with an approximate number of more than 200 police stations, with every police station registering an FIR, granting 90 days of exhaustive remand… before the accused reaches a court of law for trial, he would have already spent 49 years and three months in jail, thus negating the whole presumption of innocence of the accused guaranteed to him by law," the court said, asking Alam to furnish two surety bonds and a personal bond of Rs 2 lakh to secure this release.

The court observed that the Hurriyat leader has been under detention intermittently since April 15, 2015 for one offence, which would generally place the accused under detention for 90 days. But in his case, the state police put him under detention for several such 90-day periods, citing threat to the national security that they believe he poses. Roohi told the police to allow the law to take its own course instead of trying to detain him indefinitely.

In 2010, Alam was arrested for holding protests in Kashmir. He was released in 2015, only to be arrested again a month after his release for allegedly unfurling a Pakistani flag at a rally in Srinagar.