The Allahabad high court on Thursday ordered the immediate release of Abhay Kumar, director of MZ Wiztown Planners, after finding that the arrest in connection with the Noida techie death case was carried out without following mandatory procedures.
Kumar was arrested on January 20 in connection with the death of a 27-year-old techie whose car plunged into a water-filled basement of a vacant under-construction plot in Sector 150 early January 17 morning.
The bench of Justices Siddhartha and Jai Krishna Upadhyay observed that the police had failed to follow procedure under Clause 13 of the arrest memo, which requires informing the accused of the reasons for their arrest and providing them with a copy of the memo before taking them into custody.
“We find that the facts of this case are covered by the aforesaid judgment of this court by violation of Clause 13 of the memo of arrest,” observed the bench.
Senior counsel Manu Sharma, assisted by counsel Ram M Kaushik and four others, filed a habeas corpus writ petition before the Allahabad high court, terming the arrest as “illegal custody,” while declaring the arrest, detention, and remand of the petitioner as illegal, null, and void, referring to a Supreme Court judgment.
The petition also sought the quashing of the chief judicial magistrate (CJM), Gautam Budh Nagar’s remand orders dated January 20 and 21. Apart from this, a departmental inquiry was demanded into the actions of the errant police officials.
The petitioner relied on the January 22 order of the Allahabad High Court in Umang Rastogi vs State of UP, in which the station house officer (SHO) of Bisrakh, Greater Noida, had arrested a man from Haldwani, Uttarakhand, on November 28, 2025, and kept him in illegal custody at the police station.
In that case, the court observed that the petitioner was arrested without disclosure of the grounds of arrest in the arrest memo.
It was highlighted that Clause 13 of the arrest memo, which requires that the accused be informed of the reasons for arrest and be provided a copy of the memo before being taken into custody, had not been complied with in the present case either, nor was it supplied to the petitioner before effecting his arrest.
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The bench quashed the judicial custody remand order of the CJM, Gautam Budh Nagar, and directed the authorities to release the petitioner forthwith. Subsequently, Abhay Kumar, who was imprisoned in Greater Noida was released, his counsel Kaushik confirmed.
The victim, Yuvraj Mehta (27), died in the early hours of January 17 after his car plunged into a deep, waterlogged excavation pit on a vacant plot in Sector 150. Mehta, a software engineer, was returning home from his office in Gurugram when he reportedly lost control of his vehicle in dense fog, broke through a low boundary at a sharp 90-degree turn, and fell into the pit.
According to investigators and eyewitness accounts, Mehta managed to climb onto the roof of his partially submerged car and called his father for help. Police, firefighters, and teams from the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) reached the site, but rescue efforts failed to save him. For nearly 90 minutes, Mehta remained trapped, calling for help as his vehicle slowly sank. By the time he was pulled out, he had died.
Following the incident, two FIRs were registered. The first FIR, lodged on January 18 at Knowledge Park police station, was registered under Sections 105 (culpable homicide), 106 (causing death by negligence), and 125 (act endangering life) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) against MZ Wiztown and Lotus Green Pvt Ltd. The second FIR, registered on January 21, was filed under charges related to environmental protection and the prevention and control of water pollution against five builders. Two other office-bearers of Lotus Green Pvt Ltd who were arrested were later released on bail.