NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Tuesday disposed of a petition alleging “illegal” custody of AAP MLA Kuldeep Kumar, who was leading a protest against the murder of a sanitation worker, after the police said that he was taken into preventive detention and has now been released.
The submission was made during the hearing of a ‘habeas corpus petition’ filed by Kumar’s family. The petition claimed that “police personnel in plain clothes picked up the legislator at around 4am on Tuesday, and since then they have not been able to contact him”. The counsel added that since then he has not been contactable until the matter was mentioned before the bench headed by the chief justice.
According to the Delhi Police sources, the MLA was detained around 5am on Tuesday and released around 3.30pm. They said that Kumar had allegedly asked the sanitation workers to not work.
“He had also asked the victim’s family to not give permission for the autopsy, claiming that they would otherwise not get compensation and a government job. The MLA was also planning to block the Delhi-Meerut Expressway if the postmortem examination is conducted,” police sources added.
However, the AAP slammed the Delhi Police for detaining Kumar, stating that the police did not disclose Kumar’s whereabouts or reason for his detention. AAP National Convenor Arvind Kejriwal said, “At 4 am, your police picked up Kumar from his home, broke the CCTV cameras at his residence and took away the DVR.
Now your police are not telling anyone anything about him. If a sitting MLA can be picked up from his home by the police in this manner, then where is the ‘aam aadmi’ supposed to go in this country? People will not tolerate such gundagardi.”
The Delhi BJP however, said that the private company had offered appropriate compensation to the family of the deceased. They alleged that, in order to further his political interests, Kumar led the protest.