Solicitor General Tushar Mehta on Friday flagged a “serious lapse” in the Supreme Court’s security after Kashmiri separatist Yasin Malik showed up in court, India Today reported.
Mehta wrote to Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla, stating that the security of the Supreme Court was compromised by the jail authorities who brought Yasin Malik.
“It is my firm view that this is a serious security lapse. A person with a terrorist and secessionist background like Yasin Malik who is not only a convict in a terror funding case but has known connections with terror organisations in Pakistan could have escaped, could have been forcibly taken away or could have been killed,” Mehta wrote.
Earlier in the day, the court also expressed displeasure over Yasin Malik’s appearance. As soon as the hearing began, a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Dipankar Dutta said, “Justice Dutta can’t hear this matter.”
Tushar Mehta highlighted that there is an order passed by the Ministry of Home Affairs with regard to Yasin Malik under Section 268 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which prevents the jail authorities from bringing the said convict out of the jail premises.
According to Mehta, neither had the Supreme Court summoned Malik, nor had any permission been taken from the court for this move. Mehta, in his letter, questioned the officer in charge of Malik’s security about the reasons for physically bringing him to the Supreme Court.
In response, the officer showed him a printed notice, sent to all parties involved in the case before their hearings. Mehta in his letter said that the jail authorities receive hundreds of such notices daily but never before have they construed this to mean that personal presence of the accused is required.
Yasin Malik appeared in the top court when a bench headed by Justice Surya Kant was hearing an appeal filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against the September 20, 2022 order of a trial court in Jammu in the 1989 kidnapping case of Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.
Yasin Malik is currently serving a life sentence in Delhi’s Tihar Jail in a ‘terror-funding case’.
