JNU row: Kanhaiya Kumar sent back to Tihar jail by Delhi court

New Delhi: JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar was on Friday sent back to Tihar jail by a Delhi Court on completion of a day’s police remand which was sought to interrogate him with two other students of the varsity, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, all arrested in a sedition case. [caption id=“attachment_2645338” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Kanhaiya Kumar was sent back to Tihar jail. PTI[/caption] Kumar was sent back to judicial remand, which will end on 2 March, after the police told the court that they did not need his further custody, said Kumar’s counsel. The court had on Thursday sent Kumar to one day police custody after the prosecution said that he was needed to be confronted with Khalid and Anirban in view of discrepancies in their statements regarding the controversial JNU event. All three of them were on Friday interrogated together for the first time at a south Delhi police station. They were subjected to two rounds of questioning, with Kumar being confronted with the two separately in the first round and together in the second, a police source said. Around 4.20 pm, Kumar left the premises of the RK Puram police station for Tihar, the source said, adding that police is likely to seek further remand of Khalid and Anirban, whose police custody ends on Saturday. The police source claimed that Kanhaiya has so far maintained that on 9 February, he came out of his room only when he got to know about a possible confrontation between two groups over the event inside the campus and has dissociated himself with the event. While Khalid has so far denied having indulged in any anti-national sloganeering, Anirban challenged claims that the slogans mentioned by the police were anti-national in nature. The police also showed them raw footage of the video of the 9 February event to ascertain identities of others involved in it, especially whom the police had earlier termed as “foreign elements”. In the statement attached with the FIR, police had identified Umar and Anirban as the “main organisers” and later in the court, the investigators mentioned about the presence of “foreign elements” (outsiders) in the event. While Kumar was arrested on 12 February and sent to judicial custody five days later, Khalid and Anirban surrendered before the police on Monday, a day after they resurfaced at the varsity’s campus. All three of them were arrested in a case of sedition and criminal conspiracy registered over the controversial JNU event against the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, in which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised. PTI