Ex-AIADMK minister Jayakumar granted bail in one case

XVI Metropolitan Magistrate M Dayalan, attached to the court complex in George Town area, granted the bail after listening to the arguments advanced by senior counsel A Natarajan, today.

Section 7(1)(a) of the Criminal Law Amendment (CLA) Act was used to re-arrest Jayakumar in the second case. This section says that preventing a person from doing or to do any act which such person has a right to do, is punishable.

Jayakumar was originally arrested on Monday by the city police on the charges of attacking a DMK man and parading him shirtless during the polling to urban local bodies on February 19. His bail application in this main case was posted for further hearing on Friday (Feb. 25), by the Principal Sessions Judge S Alli, today.

Meanwhile, the Tondiarpet police filed an application before the Magistrate seeking Jayakumar's custody for five days.

Earlier, in the second case, Jayakumar's counsel Natarajan argued that the police had altered the FIR registered in the first case and included sec. 7(1)(a) of the CLA Act only to make the offence non-bailable. The police had no power to register an FIR under Sec. 188 of the IPC and later include Sec. 7(1)(a) of the CLA Act as the Madras High Court had already held in the negative. The alteration was invalid and has no legal legs to stand. As per the ruling of the High Court, this section was also a bailable offence. Bringing in this section in the second case was totally irrelevant. Hence, both Sec.188 and 7(1)(1) had to be omitted. Other than these two sections, all the other offences were bailable, he argued. As regards to the custody plea, Natarajan told the Magistrate that no custody was required in this case. The High Court had held that the police can very well interrogate the accused person inside the prison itself and not all the cases required police custody, he added.

The Magistrate adjourned further hearing on the custody issue by a day. He also directed the authorities concerned to produce Jayakumar in the court on Friday.