Mumbai: Republic TV Chief Arnab Goswami who was arrested in connection to a 2018 abetment to suicide case has been shifted to Taloja Jail in Navi Mumbai on allegation of using mobile phone while in Judicial Custody at Alibaug Municipal School quarantine Centre, reports Times of India
Goswami’s wife, who is also the Senior Executive Editor of the channel confirmed the news. In a press note issued on Sunday morning, she said,
“This morning my Editor-in-chief and husband, who has spent 4 nights in judicial custody, was being dragged and lugged by the Maharashtra Police in a blacked-out police van to Taloja Jail.”
She claimed that Goswami kept saying that his “life is under threat” but to no avail. He repeatedly said that the jailer assaulted him after he asked for access to his lawyers, which was shockingly denied. He detailed the assault being inflicted on him during this custody and pleaded, hands folded, to the Supreme Court of India for intervention and bail.
Expressing her husband’s plight, she alleged,
“The state machinery has turned into a handmaiden for politically motivated aggression and the pillars of democracy cannot be spectators to the grave and brazen human rights abuses and state excesses deployed against a citizen in the state of Maharashtra by state machinery.”
She has urged the institutions to hold take note of the “gross abuse and misuse of power” by the Maharashtra Government and urged the Supreme Court to intervene in the matter.
Goswami has been in custody since Wednesday. He was remanded to judicial custody by CJM Alibag. A habeas corpus petition against the remand order is pending before the Bombay High Court.
A Division Bench has concluded hearing in the matter and is likely to give its verdict tomorrow.