The High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh has blasted J&K government officials for booking Jamaat-e-Islami spokesperson and advocate Zahid Ali under the stringent Public Safety Act.

The court blamed the Pulwama district magistrate and senior superintendent of police for behaving like a “law unto themselves” and as “an extra-constitutional authority” to sustain his custody. The high court asked the administration to release Ali and pay ₹5-lakh compensation to the petitioner, offering a rare reprieve to a member of a banned outfit.

Ali was booked four times between 2019 and 2022 and one of the common grounds in all orders was “it was done to prevent him from acting in a manner prejudicial to the state”.

“This court cannot be diplomatic to avoid observing that if left to whims and fancies of SSP Pulwama and district magistrate Pulwama, then the judgment… quashing a given preventive detention of a person is of no interest to them,” Justice Rahul Bharti said in the order.

“(The) same very person by repeat of the pretext can be made to suffer cyclic preventive detentions to outnumber judgments quashing the given preventive detentions,” he added.

The court has quashed his confinement under the act, which allows detention without trial, calling it illegal and unjustified. “This court cannot resist but to hold that the preventive detention of the petitioner is mala fide and illegal, ab origine and ab intra,” the judge said.

“The petitioner has been made to suffer loss of his liberty for a cumulative period of more than 1,080 days of preventive custody covered under the span of four detention orders in a row from 2019 to ending March 2024,” he added.

The high court rapped the district magistrate and the senior superintendent of police for not bothering to read the previous detention orders before passing the fourth order. The order was pronounced on April 3 but became public on Saturday.