Man who went to fight for ISIS granted bail by Bombay HC because ‘he was an engineering student & committed a mistake’

27-year-old Areeb Majeed, who left to fight for ISIS in 2014, has walked of prison today after his bail was upheld by the Bombay High Court. He had allegedly left to join ISIS with three other absconding accused in 2014 and returned six months later, following which he was promptly arrested and handed over to the NIA.

As per the NIA, all four men formed a lawful association with an intention to promote terrorism in Iraq, Syria and India. They also participated in terrorist activities in Syria and Iraq and they were likely to commit such acts in India also.

Majeed allegedly returned to India with the intention of carryingout such terrorist acts in India, including blowing up the Police Headquarters at Mumbai. On November 29, 2014, the NIA arrested Majeed, and he was lodged at Arthur Road jail.

The Court’s judgement although was quite a bit shocking apart from the fact that they gave a clean chit to a suspected terrorist but with the reasons that were literally what the media used to brainwash Kasab, Osama and Afzal with.

The Court said, “We have observed that the respondent is an educated person, who was completing his graduation in Civil Engineering when he left for Iraq at the age of 21 years. He categorically stated before us that as a 21-years-old, he was carried away and that he had committed a serious mistake, for which he had already spent more than six years behind bars.”

“In the past more than six years of his incarceration, the respondent has argued his case on his own before the NIA Court. He represented his own case before this Court as well as the NIA Court and we could find that he was presenting his case by maintaining decorum and in a proper manner,” it added.

The court also took into account, “His father is a doctor of Unani medicine and his sisters are also doctors. His brother is an engineer. This shows that he comes from an educated family and that if stringent conditions are imposed upon him, with an undertaking to cooperate with the trial proceedings before the NIA Court, his release on bail may not be harmful to the society at large and it would not adversely affect the trial proceedings.”