PoliticsCourts
Azam Khan takes ED arrest to Supreme Court; CJI says plea will come up this week
The Samajwadi Party leader was picked up by the Enforcement Directorate days after walking out of Rampur jail on bail. On Monday his counsel asked the Chief Justice for an early hearing.
Key points
- Azam Khan has asked the Supreme Court to quash his arrest by the ED and the order sending him to judicial custody.
- Chief Justice Surya Kant said the plea would be listed for hearing this week.
- A Ghaziabad special court remanded the 78-year-old to 14 days of judicial custody on Sunday.
Samajwadi Party leader Mohammad Azam Khan has moved the Supreme Court against his arrest by the Enforcement Directorate, which detained him at the gate of Rampur jail last week just as he was being freed on bail in another case.
His counsel, Nizam Pasha, mentioned the petition before a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana on Monday morning and asked for it to be listed at the earliest. The court did not give an immediate date, but the Chief Justice said the plea would come up for hearing during the week.
The petition asks the court to quash the arrest and the remand order that followed, and to release Khan from custody in the meantime. According to his counsel, ED officers arrested him about 40 minutes after he walked out of jail.
From one case to the next
Khan, 78, and his son Abdullah Azam Khan had been granted bail by the Allahabad High Court in the dual PAN card case. The High Court suspended Khan’s sentence but did not stay his conviction. Within hours of his release, the agency took him into custody, and on Sunday a special court in Ghaziabad sent him to 14 days of judicial custody.
The money laundering case concerns the Mohammad Ali Jauhar University in Rampur, linked to the Jauhar Trust. The ED has built it on dozens of FIRs that Uttar Pradesh Police filed against him and his associates, including complaints by farmers who say their land was forcibly taken for the campus. The agency also alleges that government money meant for public works was diverted to the private university while Khan was the state’s urban development minister.
On 28 October the ED said it had attached university land and buildings worth ₹1,170 crore. Earlier, in July, the Rampur Development Authority ordered 38 buildings on the campus to be demolished; the university has appealed.
Khan, a former Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister and one of the Samajwadi Party’s senior-most leaders, faces a string of other criminal cases. His plea is expected before the court later this week.