In a significant development, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court Tuesday directed the Uttar Pradesh government to give it details of the steps it had taken to provide security cover to the judges who had delivered the verdict in Ayodhya shrine title suits and also to the lawyers who represented Hindu parties.
Hearing a petition filed by a local lawyer Ranjana Agnihotri — one of the lawyers who appeared for the Hindu parties, before the special bench of Justice Sudhir Agarwal, Justice S.U. Khan and Justice D.V. Sharma, a division bench of Justice D.P. Singh and Justice D.K. Upadhyay further enquired from the government on whether it had investigated the information received by it about the threat perception.
Posting the matter for March 22, the two judge bench further directed its registry to inform Chief Justice Syed Rafat Alam and Justice Uma Nath Singh about the issue, so as to enable the security committee of the court to take up the matter and do whatever was necessary.
Agnihotri had demanded that she be provided security in view of the terror threat to her.
She presented a a letter sent by Madhya Pradesh Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad to the Oudh Bar Association Jan 3, mentioning that the ATS had nabbed Mohammadd Habeeb, Sheikh Mujeeb Ahmed, Mohd Aslam and Mohd Sajid of banned SIMI and Indian Mujahideen from Ujjain city June 5, 2011 and learnt they planned to murder the judges, who delivered verdict in Ayodhya title suit and the lawyers representing Hindu sides.
Agnihoti also said that the terrorists had also done a recce of Lucknow as well as court premises of the Lucknow bench and said that the ATS reported that CD/DVDs, pen drives containing photographs of the lawyers had been recovered from the arrested.
The ATS had also passed on the information to the then Special DGP (Law, Order & Security) of Uttar Pradesh Police June 9, 2011.
