New Delhi: The Allahabad high court has made strong comments on the Uttar Pradesh Police’s alleged unlawful detention and consistent non-availability of police station CCTV footage. The court has said that “the civil liberties situation in the state is shameful, to say the least”. The court has significantly held that the police cannot use the excuse of CCTV malfunctioning in a case of alleged unlawful detention.Live Law reports that a two-judge bench of Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev have said that the police appear to have “little regard” for the fundamental rights and civil liberties of citizens. It has said that infringement of these rights seems to have become a matter of routine for the Uttar Pradesh Police. The court said all this while admitting a habeas corpus petition filed by Afzal Ahmad, who claimed that he was taken into custody by Bijnor Police on September 5, 2026, but his formal arrest was shown only two days later, on September 7. The court ordered that the petitioner be set free forthwith. It have levied costs on the state, ordering the Adityanath government to pay Rs 20,000 as costs to the corpus within seven days. The petition was filed by Ahmad’s daughter alleging that the police personnel and SOG officials in civil dress forcibly took away her father from outside the police station, where both of them had gone after being called by the police. According to the plea, they reached the police station at around 2.30 pm on September 5. While they were in their vehicle and had contacted the SHO, a car entered the premises near the police station gate. Four persons allegedly came out of the vehicle, surrounded their car and forcibly took Ahmad away. To ascertain the facts, the high court had earlier directed the state to produce CCTV recordings of the police station from September 5, at 1 pm, until September 7, 2026, at 10 am. But the state informed the court that the CCTV footage for the said period was not available. The state relied on a general diary entry dated September 5, reports Live Law, which stated that a thunderstorm occurred and water trickled down the LAN cable into the CCTV system, causing it to malfunction and fail. But the bench took exception to the police’s explanation and referred to repeated instances of CCTV footage non-availability “In case after case whenever CCTV footages are called for by this court, in large majority of the cases, it is the same report which comes stating that CCTV footage is not available on account of one reason or other,” the bench said. The bench also pointed out that the overall issue concerning the failure of the CCTV system in Uttar Pradesh was being dealt with separately in another matter (presently reserved for judgment). The bench further clarified that the excuse of a CCTV malfunctioning would be sufficient for it to accept the petitioners’ contention that the corpus had been unlawfully detained and that the CCTV footage was deliberately withheld to “obfuscate the truth maliciously”. Recording its displeasure against the SHO, recording that she had deliberately not made the footage available to the bench, it directed that this be recorded into her service records. It further said that the state should consider her further continuation on the present post.