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The Bombay High Court on Monday granted 4 weeks protection to Rana Ayyub, who had sought indulgence of an anticipatory bail viz. the FIR filed against her and 8 others on June 15 2021 at Uttar Pradesh for allegedly sharing a 'fake' video to fan communal tension.

A bench of Justice PD Naik stated that in the event of arrest, the applicant be released on executing a PR Bond of Rs. 25,000 with one or more sureties and that protection could be granted for a period of four weeks to enable her to approach the concerned court in UP.

Senior Advocate Mihir Desai, appearing for Ayyub stated that since the accused had just undergone spinal surgery, temporary relief may be granted to her so as to approach approach court and seek appropriate relief, i.e. of a transit bail from the state of Uttar Pradesh to her state of residence, Maharashtra.

"At best, she is a journalist," Desai argued, adding that Ayyub had only forwarded the alleged fake news video.

FIR had been filed against Alt News Co-Founder Mohammed Zubair, Rana Ayyub, Saba Naqvi, the Wire & congress leaders Shama Mohammed, Salam Nizami & Maskoor Usmani. 

Twitter Inc. & Twitter Communications Pvt. Ltd. were also named in the FIR for failing to take down/flag the tweets.

The FIR was  filed at 11.20 PM on June 15 at P.S. Loni Border under sections 153 (provoking riots), 153A (promoting enmity between religious groups), 295A (insulting religious beliefs), 505 (statements inducing public mischief) & 120B (punishment of criminal conspiracy).

The contents of the FIR (translated from english to hindi - not verbatim) are as under:

"Some people have circulated a video on their social media handles. This video has some mischevious elements who are beating up a senior citizen namely Abdul Samad Saifi , forcefully cutting his beard. It is alleged that the mischevious elements are from the Hindu Community and they have forced Abdul Samad Saifi to say "Jai Shri Ram" and "Vande Mataram". 

The aforementioned people have circulated the video on their handles without inquiring into the veracity of the clipping. They have given the alleged incident a communal colour, with a clear intention to incite communal hatred between the Hindu and Muslim communities.

The tweets by these twitter handles were retweeted and shared on a large-scale. Upon preliminary investigation by Ghaziabad police, it was found that the people in the video were known to Abdul Samad Saifi since before and that Saifi has sold them a Tabeez (amulet), which they claimed did not work as promised. Following this, the mischevious elements, in a fit of rage, beat up Abdul Samad Saifi. The Ghaziabad police arrested three persons in this light. It was found that the people involved were actually from both hindu and muslim communities. Following this, the police immediately released a press note detailing the sequence of events on their twitter handle (on intervening night of June 14/15, 2021). Be it as it may, the accused persons continued to incite communal hatred and due to this, this fake news with communal colour spread rapidly. Inspite of this, Twitter Inc. and Twitter Communications India Pvt. Ltd. did not remove the tweets from the said handles.

Considering their influence, the aforementioned accused persons have a responsibility that they must keep up. Needless to say, this is not the first time that the accused persons have tried to peddle fake and misleading news."