Hearing on Janardhana Reddy's bail plea after a week

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Former Karnataka minister Gali Janardhana Reddy and his brother-in-law Srinivasa Reddy will have to spend another week in jail in an illegal mining case as a continuing strike by Telangana lawyers on Thursday forced another adjournment on their bail petitions.

A special Central Bureau of Investigation court adjourned the hearing on their bail pleas to Sep 29.

With lawyers from Telangana region continuing to boycott courts at the Nampally Criminal Court complex, counsel for the accused did not turn up before the court. The judge later adjourned the hearing.

The CBI filed a reply opposing the bail pleas and said if the accused were granted bail they may try to tamper with evidence.

The investigating agency informed the court that it needed to question the two accused and others to gather more evidence.

The CBI has already filed a petition for nine-day custody of the accused. The court would take up the plea on Friday.

The probe agency told the court that Srinivasa Reddy never acted as managing director of Obulapuram Mining Company (OMC) and signed all the documents only as a director. It claimed that there was evidence that the accused indulged in illegal mining.

The court Sep 19 extended the judicial custody of the accused till Oct 3. The same day, the CBI moved a petition seeking their custody for nine days. The federal agency had earlier questioned them for six days.

They were arrested by the CBI from Bellary in Karnataka Sep 5 in connection with the illegal mining in Andhra Pradesh's Anantapur district.

They were brought to Hyderabad the same day and the court sent them to judicial custody till Sep 19.