The Chhattisgarh Police on Wednesday said Zee News anchor Rohit Ranjan was absconding after a team sent to his residence in Ghaziabad’s Indirapuram to arrest him for a second time in two days could not find him there.Deputy police superintendent (Raipur) Udayan Behar said they were informed late on Tuesday night that the Uttar Pradesh Police picked Ranjan for questioning and arrested him before he was released on bail. “Assuming that Ranjan will be back home after being released, we reached his residence at 8am on Wednesday. He was not there and his house was locked,” said Behar. He said they will visit Zee News office in Noida as part of their investigation.
Rohit Ranjan had approached the Supreme Court over multiple police cases filed against him for airing a fake news on Congress MP Rahul Gandhi. Mr Rajan's petition, however, was not listed in the court records, which was seen as a violation of protocol.This prompted an apology from senior lawyer Siddharth Luthra, who appeared for the anchor."This is not even on record and not yet filed. We should have been told that the matter has not been filed. This is no ground," Justice Indira Banerjee said.Through the Supreme Court had agreed to list the matter tomorrow, it later got to know the petition papers have not been filed before the court officially. Matters can be mentioned in the Supreme Court only after a petition has been registered in the records.Cases were filed in Congress-ruled Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh after Mr Ranjan, on his show, played a Rahul Gandhi statement on an attack on his office in Kerala's Wayanad, allegedly running it as a comment on the killers of a tailor in Udaipur.