Mumbai: A sessions court Monday reserved order till December 26 on the bail application filed by five persons arrested for alleged links with Naxals, promoting their ideology, and targeting youths to join the outfit.

The accused had filed the bail plea after the Bombay high court quashed the sessions court order granting an extension to the ATS to file a charge-sheet against them. According to the accused, as the HC had set aside the extension, the charge-sheet could not be considered as filed within the stipulated period and the accused were entitled to default bail.

The prosecution strongly opposed the bail application on grounds that they wanted to challenge the HC order and hence, applications of all the accused for bail should be rejected. The applicants’ lawyer, Arif Siddiqui, on the other hand, cited the Supreme Court judgment in the Uday Mohanlal Acharya versus the state of Maharashtra which stated that if a court passed an order granting extension of charge-sheet and a higher court held that the order of granting the extension was not correct, the accused were entitled to statutory bail. After hearing the arguments, sessions Judge D.-S. Deshmukh reserved or-der on the bail pleas till December 26.

It may be recalled that the ATS arrested the applicants for allegedly being members of the banned CPI (Maoist). They filed bail applications in the sessions court after the Bombay high court set aside the order of the sessions court granting an extension to the ATS to file a charge-sheet in the case. Accor-ding to the applicants, since the HC had termed the extension illegal, they are entitled to a default bail because the ATS had filed the charge-sheet bey-ond the stipulated period of 90 days.

In the high court, Sudeep Pasbola had contended before Justice Mridula Bhatkar that it was mandatory that the accused were served notice about application seeking an extension of time for filing the charge-sheet.