By Sabah Gurmat
New Delhi: A coerced confession. A false claim of video evidence. A 54-day wait to arrest a riot “mastermind”. Phone messages, never retrieved, with an unnamed “boss” as proof of conspiracy.
These were some of the grounds on which the Supreme Court struck down a 351-day preventive detention—under a law that allows no bail—of a man the police accused of being the “principal architect” of riots in the western Uttar Pradesh (UP) town of Sambhal in November 2024.
Yet Afroz, a property dealer and businessman whom the Allahabad High Court previously noted regularly paid income tax, spent 585 days in jail before being released late on the night of 29 September from the Moradabad district jail.
In quashing Mulla Afroz’s detention under the National Security Act (NSA) 1980, the Supreme Court on 29 September 2026 found the detention order “not preventive but punitive” and said the police used the NSA “to subvert the orders granting bail”. The Allahabad High Court previously noted that Afroz was a property dealer and businessman who regularly paid income tax.
The Allahabad High Court initially granted regular bail to Mulla Afroz on 9 September 2025, in one of the primary cases linked to the Sambhal violence. Exactly 34 days later, on 13 October 2025, the Sambhal district magistrate invoked the NSA to keep him detained without trial.
Although Afroz secured regular bail in all six criminal cases by June 2026, he remained imprisoned solely because of the preventive detention order.
A Supreme Court bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu imposed costs of Rs 10 lakh on the state of UP because he had “suffered considerable loss of liberty”. It ordered payment to Afroz within a month.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.