Dalit scholar ,Dr anand Teltumbde was arrested at 3.30 am from Mumbai domestic airport when he was returning to Mumbai from Kochi. Adv Pradeep Mandhyan spoke to Inspector Indulkar from Pune who was at airport to take him into custody.

Indulkar claimed Teltumbde was being arrested since his bail had been rejected by the Pune trial court!

Special UAPA judge Kishor D Vadane observed, “Prima facie, there is sufficient material collected by the investigating officer (IO) to show involvement of the accused (Teltumbde) in the alleged commission of the offence. Investigation… is at a very crucial stage and it appears custodial interrogation of the applicant-accused is necessary for the grounds mentioned in the IO’s written say.”

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One of Teltumbde’s lawyers pointed out that Supreme Court had granted him four weeks’ protection to move for pre-arrest bail. “We have nine days to move the higher court,” the lawyer said.

On January 14, SC had declined a plea to quash the FIR against Teltumbde, a senior academic with a management institute in Goa. He had challenged the Bombay HC order. The SC had given Teltumbde four weeks to approach the competent authority, following which he had filed the anticipatory bail plea in the Pune court on January 18.

Judge Vadane had heard arguments for and against the plea on January 30 and 31, and reserved the order for Friday.

On Thursday, prosecutor Pawar had given two envelopes to the special court containing additional evidence against Teltumbde, apart from five seized documents — a part of the chargesheet filed by police that mention him as ‘Comrade Anand’, ‘Anand’ or ‘Anant T’. His counsel, Rohan Nahar, had argued that the state had no evidence apart from the IO’s opinion that the person named was Anand Teltumbde.

This action blatantly violates the Supreme Court order dt.14th January which gave Anand protection from arrest for 4 weeks so that he could approach  the courts for bail.

Teltumbde came to Mumbai as he was scheduled to file his anticipatory bail petition in the High Court this morning through his advocate, Senior Counsel Mihir Desai.

As per the above SC order Teltumbde could only be arrested after the completion of 4 weeks from the date of the order, unless he could get bail from the lower courts or the High Court.

This 4 week period of protection from arrest would expire on 11th February. So his arrest early this morning is a blatant violation of the above order.