New Delhi: The Delhi Police’s Special Cell searched the office of lawyer Mehmood Pracha once again on Tuesday, March 9.Scroll.in has quoted Pracha – who with his team is representing many accused in the February 2020 violence in Delhi – as having said that the raid was conducted when neither he nor his associates were in the office.Pracha told the news outlet that police knew that he would not be present as he was cross-examining witnesses in a case investigated by the very Special Cell that was raiding his office.“The officer in the case is the same who has ordered the raids. They took a warrant and had two weeks to raid my office, but they chose to do it today,” he told Hindustan Times separately.The raid involved more than 100 policemen, an unnamed associate of Pracha told Scroll.in.A special cell team of Delhi police raided Pracha’s office on December 24, 2020 and insisted upon seizing his computer and various documents, which contain case details and thus made the police’s action illegal.A lawyer colleague of Pracha had then told The Wire that nearly 50 members of the police team had landed at his office in Delhi’s Nizamuddin West, led by inspector Sanjeev of the Delhi Police’s Special Cell.Another lawyer colleague of Pracha had said the police insisted that he disclose information – which also goes against the Advocates Act and the privilege which is accorded to an advocate-client relationship under the Indian Evidence Act, 1872.Pracha had then said that the raids had been conducted at the behest of Union home minister Amit Shah because he was trying to establish Shah’s links with the violence in northeast Delhi.The raid had also been severely criticised by the legal practitioners. Senior members of the legal fraternity including Justice B.G. Kolse Patil, a former judge of the Bombay high court, and Supreme Court advocates Chander Uday Singh and Prashant Bhushan had said at a press conference that the police action was malafide, an invasion of privacy and coercive in nature.
