The Supreme Court on Friday permitted incarcerated Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) Chief Yasin Malik to cross-examine the witnesses in two cases through video conferencing from Tihar Jail.
The verdict was announced after a was filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) seeking 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.
The stated plea is over two separate cases in which four Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel were killed on January 25, 1990, in Srinagar, and the abduction that took place on December 8, 1989.
A bench of Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan perused the report submitted by the registrar IT of Delhi High Court and registrar general of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court regarding the facilities of video conferencing available in Tihar jail and Jammu, respectively.
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The judges, while pronouncing the judgment, noted that the Jammu sessions court was “well-equipped” with the video-conferencing system enabling the virtual examination.
It also recorded the submission of Yasin Malik that he does not want to engage a lawyer for cross-examination of the eyewitnesses.
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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