By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter,
New Delhi: The red-faced Delhi Police on May 15 filed a closure report in the case they filed against Maulana Noor-ul Huda, a cleric from Deoband who was deplaned from an Emirates flight and arrested on May 12. Community leaders had condemned the cleric’s arrest on a weak suspicion and demanded the government to release him immediately.
Maulana Noor-ul-Huda, who runs Madrasa Darul Uloom Farooqiya in Saharanpur of Uttar Pradesh, and is son of a teacher of Darul Uloom Deoband, Maualna Abdur Raheem Bastawi, was offloaded from Emirates Airlines Flight No. EK515 and handed over to the Delhi Police when a co-passenger, an NRI woman, misunderstood, mistakenly or deliberately, Huda’s phone talk with his wife wherein he had said: “Jahaz udne wala hai aur hum udne wale hain” (The plane will take off. We will fly). The woman sitting beside him thought he is saying the plane will be blown up, and she complained to the captain, and that was enough. He was offloaded and handed over to the police and the police after whole night interrogation and finding nothing against him, yet sent him to jail.
Community leaders condemned the arrest. Jamiat Ulema Hind leader and Rajya Sabha MP Maulana Mahmood Madani wrote to Home Minister P. Chidambaram seeking the cleric’s release. The Home Minister promptly intervened and asked the Delhi police to close the case.
Home Minister P Chidambaram was reportedly annoyed by the over-reaction of the police in arresting Huda. Though the police found nothing incriminating from his baggage after checking, they slapped a case of “causing mischief” under Section 425 of the IPC on him. He was not allowed to fly and was sent to judicial custody for a day.
He was granted bail on Friday (May 14) by Metropolitan Magistrate Rajesh Goel.
What 50-year-old Maulana Noor-ul-Huda had said was not unusual. Many passengers make such calls to their relatives before take off but nothing happens.
On his release from the Tihar jail, Huda said it was not so much what he had said but what he wore and represented that put him through all the torture.
Two other such incidents have taken place in the country in the last three months.
On May 5, a Spicejet flight made a ‘priority landing’ at NSC Bose Airport in Kolkata after a Russian couple, the lady in a burqa, was reported to the pilot by co-passengers as behaving suspiciously.
After landing, the Delhi-Kolkata-Dhaka Spicejet flight 208 with 123 passengers was taken to an isolation bay at the airport for a search and was surrounded by CISF personnel, the bomb squad, fire brigade and the police. The burqa-clad passenger and another person sitting next to her were offloaded and the aircraft searched. The couple was cleared after search.
The trend of offloading Muslim looking persons on mere suspicion started on February 7 this year in Mumbai.
A Muslim couple was offloaded from an Emirates flight from Mumbai to Dubai after a call to the airline that a passenger called Shahbaz Khan was an “al-Qaeda terrorist.” Khan and his wife were immediately detained. But they were also cleared later.