Law student arrested in Clubhouse case gets bail
Mumbai: A Metropolitan Magistrate Court at Bandra on Tuesday granted bail to 22-year-old Faridabad resident Yash Kumar who was arrested in connection with the Clubhouse app case
Mumbai: A Metropolitan Magistrate Court at Bandra on Tuesday granted bail to 22-year-old Faridabad resident Yash Kumar who was arrested in connection with the Clubhouse app case. Metropolitan magistrate KC Rajput granted bail to Kumar.
Appearing for the accused, advocate Gayatri Gokhale and Akshay Bafna submitted that Kumar’s was a case of mistaken identity and he was not the person named by other accused in their interrogation and that the prosecution could not prove Kumar was in any way involved in the crime.
The allegations in the First Information Report (FIR) against him was that he created the chat room where derogatory statements were made against women from a particular community and their pictures were circulated in the chatroom.
The lawyers said that none of the IDs that made the offensive statements belonged to Kumar. “The applicant himself has lodged a complaint with the social media platform that his photo was being misused by certain individuals and that he is not the creator of the chatroom. The applicant was made a scapegoat for the acts committed by others,” they contended.
The applicant, they said, is a third-year law student at Amity University in Noida. “He has a permanent residence and the agency has already taken his voice samples. All other electronic evidence was also taken from him, so there were no chances of him tampering any evidence further,” the lawyers said, adding that most of the sections invoked in the FIR are “not maintainable against Kumar, as he doesn’t own any of the ID’s that posted defamatory material”.
Based on a complaint filed by a woman, the cyber cell of the Mumbai crime branch registered a case against three accused under sections 153(a), 295(a), 354(a), 354(d), 509 of IPC, and section 67 of Information Technology Act 2000 in the Clubhouse App Chat Case. The accused arrested till now are identified as Akash Suyal, 19, Jaishnav Kakkar, 20, and Yash Parashar, 22, from Haryana.
