After 21 months in jail, Kashmiri journalist Fahad Shah came out of Jammu’s high security Kot Bhalwal prison Thursday, six days after the Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court ordered his release on bail. Founder-editor of digital magazine, The Kashmir Walla, Shah was arrested over an article published on the platform 11 years ago. A division bench comprising Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Mohan Lal had last week ordered his release, subject to him furnishing a personal bond and a surety of Rs 50,000 each. The High Court had said that an investigating agency has to justify the arrest of an accused under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) on the anvil of "clear and present danger" to the society when opposing his bail. It also rejected the police argument that honour and dignity of India is a property under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), and said criticism of the central government cannot be described as a terrorist act. In April, Wasim Sadiq Nargal of the J&K and Ladakh High Court had quashed Shah's detention under the Public Safety Act, saying that authorities did not follow the procedural requirements in letter and spirit, and that the detaining authority did not give any “compelling reasons” for detaining him under preventive detention when he was already in custody of the police in a case and no bail had been granted to him in the matter. Shah was held under provisions of the UAPA following the registration of a case by J&K’s State Investigation Agency at CIJ police station in Jammu on April 4, 2022, nearly 11 years after the publication of an article titled ‘The shackles of slavery will break’ in his magazine in 2011. The article was written by a Kashmir University scholar, Abdul Aala Fazili, who too is under arrest. A chargesheet was filed in the case in the NIA Court at Jammu in October last year and charges were framed against Shah and Fazili in March this year. In the chargesheet, SIA had stated that on April 4, 2022, it received from a “discreet but reliable source” a printout of the “highly provocative” and “seditious” article.
