Allahabad High Court orders immediate release of builder in Noida techie death case

Yuvraj Mehta lost his life drowning in the pit with no signboards nearby

• Allahabad high court orders immediate release of developer Abhay Kumar
• Court found police failed to follow legal procedure during Kumar's arrest
• Kumar's remand orders overturned for arrest memo rule violations.

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The Allahabad high court has directed the immediate release of real estate developer Abhay Kumar, holding that his arrest in a case linked to the death of a young software engineer in Noida did not comply with mandatory legal safeguards.

A division bench comprising Justices Siddhartha and Jai Krishna Upadhyay ruled that the police failed to follow the procedure prescribed under clause 13 of the arrest memo. The judges noted that this clause “requires informing the accused of the reasons for their arrest and providing them with a copy of the memo before taking them into custody.”

The order was passed on Thursday while allowing a habeas corpus petition filed on Kumar’s behalf. The plea sought “a direction to the respondents to produce and release Kumar from their illegal custody and a declaration that his arrest, detention and remand were illegal, null and void as the Supreme Court's directions in the Mihir Rajesh vs State of Maharashtra case were not followed.”

It also requested the court to “issue a writ, order or direction in the nature of certiorari, quashing the remand orders dated January 20 and January 21, and subsequent remand orders passed by the chief judicial magistrate (CJM) of Gautam Buddha Nagar.”

Kumar’s lawyer argued that the circumstances mirrored an earlier high court ruling in Umang Rastogi vs State of Uttar Pradesh, stressing that in the present matter too, “the clause-13 requirement of the arrest memo has not been complied with.” Accepting the submissions, the bench set aside the remand orders issued by the CJM on January 20 and 21.

Kumar, a director of MZ Wiztown Planners, had been taken into custody by Greater Noida Police after an FIR was registered in connection with the death of 27-year-old software engineer Yuvraj Mehta. Mehta died after his car plunged into a water-filled trench at an undeveloped site in Sector 150, Noida on January 16.

According to the case record, the trench had formed due to inadequate stormwater management, and the land parcel had remained undeveloped for several years while under the control of Wiztown Planners.

With the high court’s ruling, Kumar is to be released forthwith, though the court has not commented on the merits of the case itself, focusing solely on the legality of the arrest and subsequent custody.