ILNS: The Supreme Court bench of Justices Dinesh Maheshwari and Aniruddha Bose have refused bail to two people convicted under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 2010 (UAPA).
The bench also expressed it anguish over the fact that the matter was posted for hearing in January 2021, but the counsel of the petitioners had sought an adjournment. The bench said: “You have circulated a letter for adjournment for the last two times in the normal working days of the court. So what is the urgency in the vacation?”
On November 24, 2020 the court has granted interim bail to two UAPA convicts for one month to take care of their parents. Hafiz Abdul Majeed and Arun Kumar Jain and some others had been convicted for offence under Section 18, 18B and 20 of the UAPA and were awarded life imprisonment.
A Pakistani prisoner, Shakarullah, was murdered by four inmates in Jaipur Central Jail. The incident allegedly occurred after a fight broke out over the volume of a television set. As per officials, the inmates pulled out a stone from the television slab and hit Shakarullah on the head with it, instantly causing his death. He was around 50 years old.
“At around 1:20 pm, the nine inmates were in the same television room when the incident happened. Out of these nine, two were Pakistani. Shakarullah got agitated over the high volume of the television set and things got heated with four other convicts. There was an old television slab fixed by cement in the room. One of them pulled out a small sharp stone from the slab and hit him on his head. He immediately fell down and died. Apparently, we have found only one head injury,” Rajasthan director-general (prisons) NRK Reddy told the media.
In the wake of the murder, the Rajasthan government suspended the warden and head warden of the barrack and replaced the jail superintendent, appointing Rakesh Mohan Sharma as the new superintendent. Apart from conducting an investigation under the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) guidelines, an FIR under section 302 (murder) and section 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of a common intention) of the Indian Penal Code had also been filed.
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Shakarullah, alias Mohammad Hanif, alias Amar Singh Gill, a resident of Pakistan’s Sialkot, was booked under the UAPA in 2010 for inciting others to get training at Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) camps in Pakistan.
In 2017 a Jaipur court had found three Pakistani nationals – Shakarullah, Asghar Ali and Mohammad Iqbal – along with five Rajasthan residents named Babu, Arun Kumar Jain, Hafiz Abdul Majeed, Qabil Khan and Pawan Puri, guilty under the UAPA. All of them were sentenced to life imprisonment.