A Delhi court on Wednesday stayed the search warrants issued against Advocate Mehmood Pracha in connection with a case relating to the north-east Delhi riots till March 12.
Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Dr. Pankaj Sharma while keeping the matter for pronouncement of orders on March 12, said, “Till the pendency of the said application, the search warrants issued against the applicant are stayed.”
During the course of arguments, Pracha argued, “I am trying to save the constitutional rights of my clients. I am ready to give them everything but they didn’t give me Section 91 notice.”
“If they get sensitive info regarding my clients, their life would be at risk Just like Justice Loya, they want to kill me,” he added.
He added that he is offering his neck to save his clients life. “I am willing to face Gallows for protecting my clients life. I am ready to be the lamb. I am willing to give them the data under Section 65 B certificate,” Pracha argued.
Opposing the submissions made by him, he said, “He is trying to confuse the court. He wants to linger on this matter. When the matter was taken up last time, he was busy taking out a protest march.”
“We will have a second mirror copy exactly like the original one. You can delete your client data which you want,” Prasad argued while also explained the process of mirroring a hard disk.
Pracha rebutting the submissions said that the data is very much retrievable. “I am not giving a mirror copy and hard copy. How hard it is to retrieve data from mirror copy?” he said while suggesting that the same be done before a magistrate and the process to be video graphed.
According to Pracha’s plea, it has been alleged that the second raid was conducted in his absence wherein more than 100 police persons searched his office while he was appearing before the court of ASJ Dharmender Rana.
It has been contended that the police, while searching his official premises on December 24, 2020 and December 25, 2020, have already collected all the documents etc and seized them in a pen drive.
According to Pracha, the whole exercise was conducted with the “sole objective of illegally stealing the entire data” of the sensitive cases he has been dealing with, in which the Special Cell itself is the investigating agency.
Earlier, the Delhi Police Special Cell in December 2020 had raided the premises of Pracha in a case related to alleged use of forged documents as genuine in judicial records in a north-east Delhi riots case.