Photojournalist Kamran granted bail after 6 months

Srinagar, Mar 12: After months of speculation, a district and sessions court in the New Delhi on Monday granted bail to a Kashmiri photojournalist, who has been accused of alleged stone pelting by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
The NIA had arrested Yousuf in September 2017 from Pulwama, and he has been seeking bail since.
However, the matter was pending at the district and sessions court at Patiala House Court with no end in sight.
The trial court was supposed to adjudicate on the matter last Friday, however, the matter was delayed when the NIA submitted additional documents to argue against bail.
A court on Monday granted bail to photojournalist Kamran Yousuf who was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in an alleged funding case six months ago.
Additional Sessions Judge Tarun Sherawat allowed the bail plea of Yousuf, asking him to furnish two sureties of Rs 50,000.
Yousuf was summoned to a police station in Pulwama on September 4 last year and handed over to the NIA a day after. He was later flown to Delhi by the NIA.
Opposing the bail plea, the NIA said some witnesses had confirmed that Yousuf was shouting “anti-national slogans” and was seen “stone pelting”.
Defence counsel Warisha Farasat claimed that Yousuf was innocent.
Recently documents submitted by the National Investigative Agency in court claimed that Kamran was not a “real journalist”.
Why? Because a real journalist should have been covering the government’s development projects in the area. That, according to the agency, is a journalist’s “moral duty”.
The irony is that though Yusuf’s work was largely based on the conflict in Kashmir, “his cameras and computers did in fact yield lots of photographs of precisely such development projects”, his lawyer, Warisha Farishat had told The Wire then.