'Trailer Of Revenge': Bengaluru student gets 5-year jail term for praising Pulwama attack

A special court in Bengaluru has jailed an Engineering student for five years and fined him Rs 10,000 over derogatory Facebook posts about the Pulwama terrorist attack, police said Monday.

The accused Faiz Rasheed was arrested by the Bengaluru police and was sentenced by Judge CM Gangadhara of the special court for National Investigation Agency under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). Faiz was remanded in judicial custody in February 2019. He was never granted bail.

Since his arrest in February 2019, Rasheed has been lodged in prison as his application for bail was rejected. Many of the witnesses in the case were police personnel.

Faiz was arrested over a February 2019 post on social media hailing the terror attack in Pulwama and criticising the Indian army. He made several Facebook posts that celebrated the deaths of 40 CRPF jawans in an attack on their convoy in Jammu and Kashmir.

In his Facebook post, Faiz described it as a 'trailer of revenge' for mob lynchings and the Ram Mandir agitation, the FIR in the case stated. The police also stated that Faiz's comments could cause enmity between religions.

Police had seized his mobile phone and got it examined by a forensic science laboratory as part of their investigation. They filed a chargesheet under Indian Penal Code sections 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion), 124A (sedition) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) and section 13 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

The 2019 Pulwama attack occurred on 14 February 2019, when a convoy of vehicles carrying Indian security personnel on the Jammu–Srinagar National Highway was attacked by a vehicle-borne suicide bomber. The attack happened at Lethapora in the Pulwama district of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The attack killed 40 Indian Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel as well as the perpetrator—Adil Ahmad Dar—who was a local Kashmiri youth from the same district. The responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed.