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Abu Salem Abdul Qayoom Ansari v. The State of Maharashtra

Criminal Appeal · 2026 INSC 982Decided 10 Sept 2026
Criminal Appeal arising out of SLP (Crl.) No. 12871 of 2026
Justice Vikram Nath · Justice Sandeep Mehta

Background

The appellant, extradited from Portugal in 2005 on a sovereign assurance by the Indian government that he would not face the death penalty or imprisonment beyond 25 years, was convicted and sentenced to rigorous life imprisonment in two TADA cases (2015 and 2017, running concurrently). In an earlier 2022 judgment, the Supreme Court fixed 12 October 2005 as the start date for computing his 25-year detention limit under the sovereign assurance. The appellant then filed a habeas corpus petition before the Bombay High Court claiming he had already completed 25 years (and more, with jail remission), which the High Court dismissed; he appealed to the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Court found the appellant's computation flawed because he counted the same overlapping period (25 February 2015 to 7 September 2017) twice, once as "undertrial custody" for one conviction and again as "post-conviction custody" for the other, even though the two life sentences ran concurrently, which does not permit double-counting of the same period. On the correct computation, he had not yet completed 25 years. The Court also rejected the claim to add jail-earned remission on top of the 25-year cap, holding that the sovereign assurance merely fixed an outer limit on actual imprisonment under the still-valid life sentences; it did not convert life imprisonment into a fixed 25-year term, so ordinary remission rules for such conversions (relied on from other precedents) did not apply here. Those cases lacked the extradition-based sovereign assurance context. Finding no illegality in his continued detention, the Court upheld the High Court's judgment and dismissed the appeal in limine.

Lesson Learnt

A government's sovereign assurance capping a sentence at a fixed number of years (here, given during extradition proceedings) sets an outer limit on detention but does not convert an underlying life sentence into a fixed term for remission purposes, and custody periods running concurrently across multiple convictions cannot be counted twice to artificially shorten that limit.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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