Looking back 2023: 450 cellphones, prohibited material seized from Amritsar Central Jail throughout the year

PK Jaiswar

Amritsar, December 30

Stringent security measures notwithstanding, mobile phones continued to be sneaked inside the high-security Amritsar Central Jail complex throughout the year. A record seizure of prohibited material in 2023 was seen.

The issue also came up for discussion during yesterday’s high-level meeting of senior police officials headed by Special DGP Arpit Shukla and the IG (Prisons), besides other stakeholders of the criminal justice system, including judicial and prosecution officials, held at the Central Jail complex here.

The Special DGP told mediapersons that they had discussed security issues and problems being faced by the Amritsar Central Jail authorities.

The Punjab Government had installed mobile signal jammers in the jail complex under harmonious call blocking system to discourage the use of cellphones by criminal elements in the high-security premises. Despite that, incidents of seizure of mobile phones continued unchecked.

This year Central Jail authorities confiscated over 450 mobile phones from the premises. It is also evident that a company of paramilitary forces was also deputed on security in the jail.

Three days ago, the police booked as many as 34 jail inmates for possessing mobiles and other prohibited material, including narcotic powder, cigarette bundles, headphones or mobile chargers. The seizures were made in the recent past while a complaint was lodged with the police only on December 27.

Earlier, cases were registered against jail inmates on a regular basis, but in the recent trend, the police register a single collective FIR in seizures from the jail. On November 28, the Islamabad police had booked around 19 prisoners on a similar charge.

Similarly, the jail authorities had confiscated 31 mobile phones along with other prohibited material, including SIM cards, cigarettes and bidis, from 27 prisoners lodged in the high-security jail premises in October this year.

In November, two undertrials Akashdeep and Vishal were booked for using a mobile phone and uploading a picture on social media from inside the jail. When the picture went viral on social media platform, the police recovered the device.

The Amritsar Central Jail houses notorious cross-border drug traffickers, gangsters and foreign prisoners. Repeatedly, the police authorities had claimed that drug peddlers and notorious criminals lodged in the jail were running their network from inside the jail premises using cellphones.