NEW DELHI: Arrested activist Gautam Navlakha was minutes, perhaps seconds, away from being released by the Delhi high court on Wednesday when the Supreme Court ordered him placed under house arrest.

Ahigh court bench had to abandon dictating its order midway after learning that the apex court, which was holding a simultaneous hearing on petitions challenging the arrest of Navlakha and four other activists for allegedly being Naxal sympathisers, had stayed the remand orders passed by various courts and placed the accused under house arrest.

The HC had observed in its order till then that the Saket court’s chief metropolitan magistrate should not have granted remand without first studying the case diaries and supporting documents to show Navlakha’s involvement since his name did not figure in the FIR.

Even as senior advocate Nitya Ramakrishnan, on behalf of Navlakha, maintained that they had not approached the apex court and the order would not be applicable to him, the court said it would pass direction only after going through the top court’s order.

The court had earlier verified from police officers that the CMM neither asked for nor was shown the case diary and other papers, which were in Marathi and had not been translated till Wednesday evening.

During the two-hour hearing the HC repeatedly punched holes in the claims of the Maharasthra police and questioned both the legality of the arrest and the procedure followed. It also observed that even if all other arrests in the matter were found valid, it would not lend validity to the arrest of Navlakha.

The Maharashtra police wanted to arrest Navlakha and take him to Pune in connection with an FIR lodged there after an event held on December 31 last year had triggered violence in Koregaon-Bhima village. But the bench maintained that without apprising the court of the grounds for arrest and showing material to convince it, the Saket court could not have granted remand in a case under sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

When ASG Aman Lekhi , representing the Maharashtra police, sought some time to translate the required Marathi documents, the court asked, “When will you be able to give a complete translation of the documents, because the question is of the personal liberty of a person?”

