A group of about 100 advocates stepped out on the road, outside the district and sessions court premises at Athwa Lines, and set on fire copies of the April 29 notification, claiming that the provisions were illegal.

Prohibition officials here, meanwhile, denied any legal wrong and added that the memorandum copy submitted by the lawyers on Wednesday would be forwarded to the State government.

The lawyers, who began agitating from Wednesday, said the agitation would continue until Friday, after which a delegation comprising eight office-bearers of the bar association would go to Gandhinagar to represent the case to the home minister and the chief minister.

According to Ashit Mehta, president of the bar association, the directive issued by former Prohibition Commissioner Kuldeep Sharma was being ``misused'' to harass vehicle owners and in many cases the name of the owner was added later on by the prohibition police to facilitate confiscation of the vehicle seized in a raid.

The lawyers have been up in arms because once a vehicle is confiscated, advocates at the district court have no powers to get it released and only a higher court could order it. They, thus, stand to lose fees which they were obtaining until recently.

``This (the Prohibition Act) is a special law and thus it has special provisions. I am merely following what the notification and the Act states and nothing more than that,'' maintained DCP (Prohibition and Excise) N D Solanki. He stated that he had followed all the norms prescribed in the Act before attaching the vehicle to state property.

``When a owner fails to satisfy the prohibition department that the vehicle will not be used again to transport liquor, his vehicle has to be seized,'' he added.

Another official, connected to the legal part of the department's work, stated that the advocates had fixed amounts to get different vehicles released from the custody of the department and it ran into thousands of rupees for larger vehicles like trucks. ``This is where the lawyers are being hurt. They have no public interest to safeguard, except their own,'' he alleged.

The issue is likely to intensify further, with both the Surat prohibition division -- known for `experimenting' different provisions of the law book, as in the case of the cable operators -- and the Bar Association -- having recently won a battle with the police department in scrapping a notification on registering fatal accidents as murders -- sticking to their stands.