Surat: A local court yesterday remanded the Patel quota agitation leader Hardik Patel in police custody till October 23 in connection with the sedition case against him for allegedly instigating a Patel youth to kill policemen.
Judicial magistrate JK Christian ordered to send Hardik in the custody of police till 4 pm on October 23 on a remand petition filed by the Surat Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) seeking seven-day remand.
During the hearing which took place late in the evening, prosecutor Nayan Sukhadvala submitted that the probe agency needed to interrogate him to find out whether anybody else was involved in ‘hatching the conspiracy to kill policemen’.
Hardik had given inflammatory statement before TV cameras and the statement itself was akin to acting against the interests of the country, he said. DCB was going to conduct ‘voice spectrography test’ of Hardik at FSL to validate the evidence of TV footage, he said. Yashvant Singhvada, Hardik’s lawyer, opposed the plea and said the government had slapped the sedition charge only to suppress Patel’s movement. The alleged statement was against the police but not the government or the country, he argued.
Hardik was produced before the court after six-hour-long interrogation by DCB officials at Hajira police station, where he was kept for security reasons. The firebrand Patel leader was detained by the Rajkot rural police ahead of the India-South Africa ODI on Sunday as he had threatened to disrupt it.
