Yasin Malik trial: Supreme Court asks Jammu & Kashmir High Court registrar to ensure proper video-conferencing facilities at special court

Supreme Court directs video-conferencing facilities for Yasin Malik trials, CBI plea for transfer to New Delhi.

The Supreme Court of India on Monday (January 20, 2025) directed the registrar general of Jammu and Kashmir High Court to ensure proper video-conferencing facilities at a special court in Jammu hearing the 1989 Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping and the 1990 Srinagar shootout cases involving jailed Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief Yasin Malik and others.

The top court also directed the registrar general of the Delhi High Court to ensure proper video-conferencing facilities at Tihar jail also where Malik is lodged in connection with another terror financing case.

The Bench has asked both the High Court registrars to file their status reports on February 18, 2025 and fixed the plea of CBI for hearing on February 21, 2025. A Bench comprising Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan was hearing a plea of the CBI seeking the transfer of the trials in the 1989 Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping and the 1990 Srinagar shootout cases from Jammu to New Delhi so that Malik is not needed to be taken to the special court.

The top court on December 18, 2024, had given six accused two weeks to respond to the CBI's plea to transfer the trial the cases.

One case relates to the killing of four Indian Air Force personnel on January 25, 1990 in Srinagar and the other to the abduction of Ms. Sayeed, daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, on December 8, 1989. Malik, chief of the banned organisation JKLF, is facing trial in both cases.

The top court was hearing a CBI plea against the September 20, 2022 order of a Jammu trial court directing Malik, serving a life term in Tihar jail, to be produced before it physically to cross-examine prosecution witnesses in Ms. Sayeed case.

The CBI said Malik was a threat to national security and cannot be allowed to be taken outside the Tihar jail premises. Ms. Sayeed, 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 early 1990s.