Another mobile phone seized from central jail
PK Jaiswar
Tribune News Service
Amritsar, May 13
The instances of the seizure of mobile phones continue unabated in the city as the jail authorities confiscated yet another mobile phone from an inmate, identified as Buta Singh, a resident of Kala Sanghe village in Kapurthala.
The recovery was made during a surprise check by the jail staff on Wednesday at around 11.30 am. The mobile was activated, said the complaint lodged by the jail superintendent with the cantonment police here. The police have registered a case under Section 420 of the IPC and Section 42 of the Prisoners Act against him.
With yet another incident coming to light, it appears that the authorities at the high security jail have miserably failed to curb the use of mobile phones inside the jail premises which also houses notorious gangsters, drug smugglers and foreign nationals. Various agencies had already told the government about these criminal elements operating their network from jail on mobile phones. They had urged the government for installing signal jammers in order to curtail their nefarious activities. However, the project has been hanging fire for years.
In the absence of any mechanism to jam mobile signals, prisoners adopt innovative and absurd ways to sneak in mobile phones and use them to get in touch with their counterparts outside.
In the recent raid by Police Commissioner Amar Singh Chahal and officials from the district administration, around 21 mobile phones with several SIM cards were confiscated. There have been repeated seizures of mobile handsets and SIM cards from the jail complex. Amritsar Central Jail recorded the maximum seizure of mobiles in the statewide raids in the central jails. Among the shortage of staff on the jail premises, corruption was also the reason for sneaking in of contraband and mobiles. This was pointed out by the raiding police officials.
Discontented with this, the Punjab Police immediately suspended Deputy Superintendent of Jail of Amritsar and Patti jail.
However, it needed more urgent steps to tackle the problem. Besides increasing the strength of staff inside the jail premises, installation of mobile signal jammers was another step required at the moment, said a former jail superintendent of jail while preferring not to be named.
