The Supreme Court on Friday adjourned the hearing on a plea filed by the CBI to transfer the trial against the jailed JKLF chief Yasin Malik and other co-accused in two cases from Jammu and Kashmir to Delhi.
The case was deferred due to the non-availability of the Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, while Malik was present before the court through video conferencing as the hearing was taking place.
He requested the matter to be heard after the Ramzan, to which the bench agreed.
The top court had earlier directed Malik to appear before it through video conferencing on March 7.
It was informed that the Jammu Sessions Court was “well-equipped” with the video-conferencing system enabling the virtual examination.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sought the transfer of the trials in the 1989 case of the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of former union minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, and the 1990 Srinagar shootout case, from Jammu to New Delhi.
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The apex court previously directed the registrar general of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court to ensure proper video-conferencing facilities at the Jammu Special Court while hearing two cases against Malik and others.
The top court on December 18, last year, gave six accused two weeks to respond to the CBI’s plea to transfer the trial of the cases.
The plea is over the two cases in which four Indian Air Force personnel were killed on January 25, 1990, in Srinagar and the abduction that took place on December 8, 1989.
Yasin Malik, chief of the proscribed JKLF, is facing trial in both cases.
The top court was hearing a CBI plea against the September 20, 2022 order of a Jammu trial court directing Malik, serving a life term in Tihar jail, to be produced before it physically to cross-examine prosecution witnesses in the abduction case.
The CBI said Malik was a threat to national security and couldn’t be allowed to be taken outside the Tihar jail premises.
Rubaiya, who was freed five days after her abduction when the then BJP-backed V P Singh government at the Centre released five terrorists in exchange, now lives in Tamil Nadu.
She is a prosecution witness for the CBI, which took over the case in the early 1990s.
Malik has been lodged in Tihar jail after he was sentenced by a special NIA court in May 2023 in a terror-funding case.
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