New Delhi: A day after Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) commander Yasin Malik’s appearance in the Supreme Court without a court summons for the same, Director General (DG), Prisons, has suspended four Tihar jail officials.
According to sources in Tihar, the four suspended officials include a deputy superintendent, two assistant superintendents and one head warder.
“Prima facie, it was found that it was a grave technical and judgement error on the part of suspended jail officers,” a senior jail official told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
The action followed a letter by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta to Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla citing Malik’s presence in court as a major security lapse. Meanwhile, DG (Prisons) Sanjay Beniwal also ordered an inquiry headed by the Deputy Inspector General of Prisons (Headquarters), Rajiv Singh, with the report to be submitted within three days.
Malik, a Kashmiri separatist leader, is currently serving a life sentence in Delhi’s Tihar jail after being convicted in a terror funding case. In his letter Friday, Mehta said neither had the court summoned Malik to be personally present, nor was any permission taken from any authority in the Supreme Court for the same.
Speaking to ThePrint, DG Beniwal said, “This was a major judgement error on the part of the officers. The investigation is on and if more people are found responsible, action will be taken against them. We are also trying to find solutions to avoid any such incidents in the future. Malik had to be presented through video conferencing. There was no court order.”
He added, “The printed notice was vague and Malik told jail officials that he needs to be presented in court as he is his own lawyer. Jail staffers didn’t cross check the notice which was in a general format and was not a court order seeking physical presence of the prisoner.”
“There has been a major dereliction of duty on the part of these officers and is a systematic failure,” he said.
Malik appeared in the apex court Friday during the hearing of an appeal filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), challenging two orders passed last September by a Jammu court calling for his physical presence in two separate cases — killing of four Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel, and the 1989 abduction of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of former J&K chief minister and then Union home minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed.
The Supreme Court stayed these orders in April this year.
The Solicitor General’s letter stated that an order was passed by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) under Section 268 of Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) with regard to Malik, which allows the government to deny removal of convicts of serious crimes from prison over security concerns or public interest.
“This is not either the permission of the Hon’ble Supreme Court to bring a convict facing an order under Section 268 of CrPC to come out of jail, nor it is requiring mandatory personal presence of the recipient of the order,” Mehta wrote, adding that jail authorities receive hundreds of such letters on a daily basis.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)