Zakir Naik's press meet cancelled

According to the report, arrangements had been made at a hall in South Mumbai in India. “The management of the Mehfil hall in Agripada, around 11 PM last night, told our team present at the venue that they cannot allow the press conference to take place and that we should dismantle and pack up all the venue arrangements we had made. Given no choice, our teams dismantled everything and left by around midnight,” an aide of Naik said in a statement issued in Mumbai on Thursday. Naik media interaction was first scheduled earlier this week at Trident Hotel in South Mumbai but the venue was subsequently changed to World Trade Centre. Later, the venue was again changed and a hall in the congested Agripada area of South Mumbai was chosen for the press briefing, which has also been cancelled now. The organisers of Naik’s press briefing had claimed that the Mumbai Police has instructed top hotels in the city to refrain from providing space to hold a conference, a charge which they later retracted. Naik is facing a probe by India's central and state agencies which are studying his speeches and writings to assess if there are grounds for prosecution for hate speech and incitement of violence against people of other faiths. Through his spokesperson, Naik reiterated on Tuesday that no agency had approached him for clarifications on allegedly inspiring some of the perpetrators of the July 1 Dhaka massacre through his puritanical Salafist speeches.