The High Court has granted bail to Shafiur Rahman Farabi, sentenced to life imprisonment in the case of the murder of blogger Avijit Roy.
After hearing his bail petition, the High Court bench comprising Justice Zakir Hossain and Justice K M Rasheduzzaman Raja passed the order on Wednesday.
Senior lawyer SM Shahjahan represented the bail petition in court. He was accompanied by lawyer Muhammad Hujjatul Islam Khan.
Later, lawyer Muhammad Hujjatul Islam Khan said that in 2021, the High Court accepted Shafiur Rahman Farabi's appeal for a hearing against the trial court’s verdict. "The court has now granted him interim bail. The duration of the bail will be known once the written order is received."
When asked about the grounds for the bail petition, the lawyer said: “He was convicted based on incorrect observations. In this case, there are confessional statements from four accused. None of these four mentioned Farabi's name in their statements.
"Furthermore, apart from the investigating officer, no other witness mentioned his name either. Farabi himself did not give any confessional statement. Additionally, he has been in jail in this case since 3 March 2015. These points were presented as grounds for seeking bail.”
On February 26, 2015, blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death in broad daylight in the Dhaka University area.
In this case, five were sentenced to death and one, Shafiur Rahman Farabi, was sentenced to life imprisonment by Judge Md Mojibur Rahman of Dhaka’s Anti-Terrorism Special Tribunal. The verdict was delivered on February 16, 2021.
Farabi later appealed the verdict in the same year.
